Chapter 18. Developing Mashup AIR Applications

The term mashup has been used in the music industry for quite some time to define the result of producing a new sound by mixing two or more existing pieces together, so it’s easy to guess that in the world of web applications the term means the ability of an application to combine data from more than one source.

Web application mashups were born at the same time as the new approach of Web 2.0, which, among its many objectives, was aimed at reusing different data sources to create hybrid applications. So, mashups owe their success to the growth of user-generated content on the Web. For example, with the increase of blogs on the Internet, bloggers wanted to offer services and multimedia elements in addition to classical web content, which is how services such as YouTube, Flickr, and Google Maps started to be integrated in millions of posts, adding value to the simple text. But all this wouldn’t have been possible if it hadn’t been for the increase of web services and XML data sources that could be used and invoked by the applications. Another great catalyst of mashup applications was the success of Ajax and technologies such as Flex, Ruby on Rails, and now Adobe AIR.