Workshop Rationale and Aim

While the word " mashup" is widely used, it is not really clear what a mashup is and what it is not. Some applications focus on integrating RSS feeds, others on integrating RESTful services or SOAP services, others of Atom feeds, and there are those that focus on integrating user interfaces. However, we believe mashups – and especially mashup tools with their models, languages and instruments for mashup development – do bring innovation, in that they tackle integration at the user interface level (most mashups do integrate presentation content, not "just" data), they aim at simplicity more than completeness of features (up to the point that advanced Web users, not only programmers, can develop composite applications), and they allow fairly sophisticated development tasks in the web browser.

Over the last years, we have seen many efforts invested in research on mashups, in both the industrial and the academic context, yet we are still far from a common understanding of the problems that drive the research, of the approaches that best fit given problems, and even of the benefits of the results achieved so far.

In light of these considerations, the ultimate goal of ComposableWeb is to challenge the Web Engineering community with these new research issues and to stimulate the discussion of key issues, approaches, open problems, innovative applications, and trends in these and related research areas, so as to identify technologies, solutions, instruments and methodologies effectively supporting the lightweight composition of Web applications.