Towards a Reference Architecture for Mashups

Software mashups - web applications that combine content from multiple web sites to an integrated experience have rapidly become a popular trend. Due to the novelty of mashup development, methods, tools, and architectures for creating mashups are still rather undeveloped, and there is little engineering support behind them, even if the most common architectural requirements for composing mashups can be easily identified. In this paper we present a list of architectural issues and derive a reference architecture to serve as a starting point for the design of new mashups. The long-term goal of our work is to facilitate the development and maintenance of robust, secure, and compelling mashups, and more generally ease the transition towards web-based software development.