DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN OPEN PLATFORM

FOR SERVICES INTEGRATION BASED ON MASHUP

Yanlei Liu, Haihong E

PCN & CAD Center, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Xitucheng Street, Beijing, China

Lin Ma

PCN & CAD Center, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China

Keyword: Mashup, Services integration, REST, JSON, Open platform.

Abstract: In this paper, the integration and fusion technology of the web services(mashup) is firstly introduced, and

then we introduce the main technologies used in the building of the platform: RESTful Web Services and

JSON which is a text-based lightweight data interchange format. On this basis, we propose an open platform

based on mashup for services integration. Based on this open platform the registered users can add external

services including the web services and the telecom services, develop and publish mashup processes.

Finally, we introduce examples to help understanding the use of the open platform.

1 INTRODUCTION

With the advent of the web 2.0, today's Web is no

longer confined to the general sense of browsing and

inquiry, but has become a real programming

platform. A variety of web 2.0 such as Wiki, Web

maps, online shopping, search systems appear in

order to meet the different needs of the web users.

The attendant problem is that building a web-based

application from scratch to meet the various needs is

almost impossible. The key to solving these

problems is to use the existing Web services and

combine them. In the existing web services, the

RESTful Web services and their combinations are

getting more and more attention (Stefan, 2007).

When the mashup of the internet is in full swing,

the personnel in the field of telecommunications

have noticed the capacity of mashup which can build

and provide business process quickly. Mashup has

many advantages

such as business fast provided, high-reuse data

sources, low-cost (Duane, 2006). The mobile

network with a unique operation and management

ability, strong billing support, high viscosity user

groups can provide network and services anywhere

at any time. We can make the two complement each

other after combining them. For telecom operators,

in addition to the owner of the communication

channels, they still can easily obtain the user’s

information such as age, income, or even personal

preferences (Nilanjan, 2008). All of these

information is very valuable to the advertisers. Many

operators have done some attempt work in opening

their own telecommunications capability.

2 SERVICES AGGREGATION

(MASHUP)

2.1 Conception of Mashup

In web development, a mashup is a web page or

application that uses and combines data, presentation

or functionality from two or more sources to create

new services (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup,

2010).

The term implies easy, fast integration,

frequently using open APIs (an interface

implemented by a software program that enables it to

interact with other software) and data sources to

produce enriched results that were not necessarily

the original reason for producing the raw source

data.

554

Liu Y., E H. and Ma L..

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN OPEN PLATFORM FOR SERVICES INTEGRATION BASED ON MASHUP.

DOI: 10.5220/0003587505540559

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (SSE-2011), pages 554-559

ISBN: 978-989-8425-53-9

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

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2.2 Characteristics of Mashup

The main characteristics of the mashup are

combination, visualization, and aggregation. Mashup

is important to make more useful already existing

data, moreover for personal and professional use. To

be able to permanently access the data of other

services, mashups are generally client applications or

hosted online (Martin, 2007).

In the past years, more and more Web

applications have published APIs that enable

software developers to easily integrate data and

functions instead of building them by themselves.

Mashups can be considered to have an active role in

the evolution of social software and Web 2.0.

Mashups composition tools are usually simple

enough to be used by end-users. They generally do

not require programming skills, they rather support

visual wiring of GUI widgets, services and

components together (Hazem, 2008). Therefore,

these tools contribute to a new vision of the Web,

where users are able to contribute. In this paper we

propose an open platform for users to build their

mashups, besides they can also add their own APIs

to the system.

2.3 Architecture of Mashup

The architecture of a mashup is divided into three

layers:

z Presentation/ User interaction: this is the user

interface of mashups. The technologies used are

HTML/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript,

Asynchronous JavaScript and Xml (Ajax).

z Web Services: the products functionality can be

accessed using the API services. The

technologies used are XMLHTTPRequest,

XML-RPC, JSON-RPC, SOAP, REST.

z Data: Handling the data like sending, storing

and receiving. The technologies used are XML,

JSON, KML.

Architecturally, there are two styles of mashups:

Web-based and server-based. Whereas Web-based

mashups typically use the user's Web browser to

combine and reformat the data, server-based

mashups analyze and reformat the data on a

remote server and transmit the data to the user's

browser in its final form.

Mashups appear to be a variation of a Facade

pattern. That is, it is a software engineering design

pattern that provides a simplified interface to a larger

body of code (in this case the code to aggregate the

different feeds with different APIs).

Mashups can be used with software provided as a

service (SaaS).

After several years of standards development,

mainstream businesses are starting to adopt

Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) to integrate

disparate data by making them available as discrete

Web services. Web services provide open,

standardized protocols to provide a unified means of

accessing information from a diverse set of

platforms (operating systems, programming

languages, applications). These Web services can be

reused to provide completely new services and

applications within and across organizations,

providing business flexibility.

3 KEY TECHNOLOGIES

3.1 RESTful Web Services

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style

of software architecture for distributed hypermedia

systems such as the World Wide Web. The term

Representational State Transfer was introduced and

defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding in his doctoral

dissertation (CHEN, 2008).

A RESTful web service (also called a RESTful

web API) is a simple web service implemented using

HTTP and the principles of REST. It is a collection

of resources, with three defined aspects

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State

_Transfer, 2010):

z The base URI for the web service, such as

http://example.com/resources/.

z The MIME type of the data supported by the

web service. This is often JSON, XML or

YAML but can be any other valid MIME type.

z The set of operations supported by the web

service using HTTP methods (e.g., POST, GET,

PUT or DELETE).

The PUT and DELETE methods are idempotent

methods. The GET method is a safe method (no

side-effect, implies idempotences well).

Unlike SOAP-based web services, there is no

"official" standard for RESTful web services. This is

because REST is an architecture, unlike SOAP,

which is a protocol. Even though REST is not a

standard, a RESTful implementation such as the

Web can use standards like HTTP, URL, XML,

PNG, etc (Indrajit, 2007). Currently, most Web

Services providers such as Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon,

Google have provided a RESTful Web services

APIs, for this reason we provide the API for users to

add their RESTful APIs to our open platform.

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN OPEN PLATFORM FOR SERVICES INTEGRATION BASED ON

MASHUP

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3.2 JSON

JSON (an acronym for JavaScript Object Notation

pronounced) is a lightweight text-based open

standard designed for human-readable data

interchange. It is derived from the JavaScript

programming language for representing simple data

structures and associative arrays, called objects.

Despite its relationship to JavaScript, it is language

-independent, with parsers available for virtually

every programming language.

The current network data transmission format are

mainly JSON format and the XML format. JSON

has its unique advantages to XML

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON,2011).

z JSON is much simpler than XML, JSON has a

much smaller grammar and maps more directly

onto the data structures used in modern

programming languages.

z JSON is not extensible because it does not need

to be, JSON is not a document markup

language, so it is not necessary to define new

tags or attributes to represent data in it.

z JSON encoding significantly easier than XML

while XML need coding tools.

z JSON’s decoding is also easier than XML.

XML requires translating the structure of the

data into a document structure. This mapping

can be complicated. JSON structures are based

on arrays and records. That is what data is

made of.

JSON is just beginning to become known. Its

simplicity and the ease of converting XML to JSON

makes JSON ultimately more adoptable. And in the

open platform, we use the JSON to format the data

between the internal data exchange. (CHEN, 2009)

4 DESIGN OF THE PLATFORM

4.1 Architecture of the Platform

Figure 1 illustrates the architecture of the open

platform.

The open platform can be divided into three parts:

the service access platform, the process development

platform, the process publishing platform. The

service access platform is responsible for users to

add their own service APIs which consists mainly of

telecommunications service APIs and the Internet

service APIs. The process development platform

based on the service APIs added through the service

access platform by the registered users. Registered

users can build their mashup processes on this

platform. The process publishing platform is

responsible for generating JavaScript or HTML code

which can be embed in web pages for one mashup

process. The data center is to save the data

information generated by the open platform. Users

Figure 1: The Architecture of the Platform.

4.2 Interface Design

4.2.1 Service Access Interface

The service access interface is responsible for the

access of external service APIs which mainly include

the Web service APIs and the telecommunication

service APIs. In this platform we only accept the

RESTful APIs. Users who want to add external APIs

access platform fill in the form with corresponding

parameters. After submitting the form you will see

the service appears at the process development

platform.

4.2.2 Data Access Interface

This interface give the implementation of the

communication between our server and the Web

services. The users send their request to our platform,

and then the platform send the request to the

corresponding Web services. We design a class to

visit APIs throw the POST method and the GET

method.

4.2.3 Data Analysis Interface

This interface helps to analyze the response text

from the Web service APIs. We convert the response

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data into the format of JSON and then send the result

to the user who send the request.

4.2.4 Process Publishing Interface

The mashup process generated from the process

development platform could not be used directly, the

process must be convert into the JavaScript or

HTML code which can be embedded into web pages.

Therefore we design a special module to help the

users convert their process into JavaScript or HTML

code.

5 INSTANCE DEVELOPMENT

5.1 Service Access

The system is an open platform means that the user

can add external service APIs to the platform

effectively and easily. Now we take the DouBan’s

open API for music search for example to show how

to add external APIs to the open platform. The one

who want to use this platform must have registered

at the system. In order to distinguish the different

APIs added by different users, we build a second

directory for each user to show their own APIs, the

current user can view and use the service APIs other

users add.

First, users login in the system and open the page

for API access, figure2 shows the page. After

submitting the form, figure3 shows the result, you

will say the API in the process development platform

and you can add this service to your mushup process.

Figure 2: The Page for Service.

Access

Figure 3: The Services Package.

5.2 Build One Mashup Process

Users should also login in the process development

platform to build their mashups. The interface is

divided into three parts as shown in figure4:

z Library panel: in this panel appears the

operators, services and renderers that can be

used to build the mashup:

¾ Operators:The information obtained can be

manipulated with the operators . For example,

it's possible to sort, filter or group the

information by the parameter chosen.

¾ Service: Several RESTful services that can

be invoked.Which contains three kinds of

APIs:The Web Services APIs,the APIs based

on the services of the telecommunication

class,the APIs that the users add.

¾ Renderers: the information can be

represented in different renders.

z Actions panel: the operators can be drag and

drop to it and is where they are combined in

order to collaborate to form a mashup. All the

operators, services and renderers are

represented in the panel as a form with some

fields, this is the input of the

operator .Submitting the form, the result of the

operator is shown in the below part of the form.

z Output panel: the mashup should be dragged

and dropped to this panel to be exported.

5.3 Publish Mashup Process

After building the mashup process, the user can

export the process into JavaScript or HTML code so

that the developer can embed these code in their

applications. Figure4 is the example to use the

Google Maps API, if you click the “Publish as

Javascript”, you will get the Javascript code as

follows:

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN OPEN PLATFORM FOR SERVICES INTEGRATION BASED ON

MASHUP

557

Figure 4: The Page for Process Development.

src="http://59.64.154.86:8080/MyCocktai

l/js/afrous/afrous-config.js"></script>

src="http://

59.64.154.86:8080/MyCocktail/js/afrous/

afrous-core.js"></script>

src="http://

59.64.154.86:8080/MyCocktail/js/afrous/

afrous-package.js"></script>

src="http://

59.64.154.86:8080/MyCocktail/js/afrous/

renderers/google-maps.js"></script>

var procdef = new

afrous.ProcessDef({"name":"","descripti

on":"","params":[],"output":"${googlema

pslocator}","actions":[{"type":"Rendere

r.GoogleMaps.GoogleMapsLocator","name":

"googlemapslocator","inputs":{"placeNam

e":"beijing","width":"400","height":"50

0","zoomController":"true","mapTypeCont

roller":"true","mapType":"Normal"}}]});

var proc = new

afrous.ProcessInstance(procdef);

proc.start(function(result)

{ result.render(document.getElementBy

Id("mydiv"));

})

</script>

6 CONCLUSIONS

As a new member of the Web 2.0, the open platform

for building mashups is the exploration stage of

development. In this paper, we attempt to put

forward a fusion of an open platform for services

integration, introduce the key interfaces designed in

the system and teach the readers how to use the

platform through a complete example.

Practice shows that the platform can accept the

external services effectively and easily and suits

mashup process development perfectly, the

developing time is also shorted.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work is supported by the National Key project

of Scientific and Technical Supporting Programs of

China (Grant Nos.2008BAH24B04,

2008BAH21B03, 2009BAH39B03); the National

Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant

No.61072060); the Program for New Century

Excellent Talents in University

(No.NECET-08-0738); and the Innovation

Technology Star Program of Beijing (Grant

No.2007A045).

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MASHUP

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