A blog about Raymond Yee’s Book Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services
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While finishing my book, it wasn't possible for me to keep up with all the changes that were happening with the many web applications I track in the book. One such change came in Yahoo! Pipes: Pipes Blog » Blog Archive » New "Fetch Page" module and nice web path enhancement….
I have to try the Pipes Fetch Page Module to do some scraping of HTML pages. Also one can start using nicer URLs for various pipes. For instance,
can now be substituted with
I just posted the following chapters -- for your edication and entertainment:
As always, I'd be grateful for any constructive feedback: questions, comments, expressions of bewilderment. 
In chapter 9, I look in detail at some individual mashups. I also want to know more about mashups in general, to do a macro-analysis of mashups. That is, I would look at the broadest range of mashups to look for design patterns that cross many examples.
One way forward would be an analysis using ProgrammableWeb, probably the single best compilation available of mashups and corresponding APIs available on the public web. There are some patterns that are immediately obvious from a study of the site; I say immediately obvious because John Musser, its creator has surfaced these elements in the interface. Let me point out some of the data about mashups:
In addition, to what is obvious in the data, I would like to pose more questions that should be derivable from what is in ProgrammableWeb.com:
As of the writing of this book, there is no formal API to programmableweb.com -- so answering these and allied questions require some other form of access to the data. I'm working with John to get such access.
In Chapters 9 and 11, I analyze service composition frameworks, tools that make it easier to create mashups, for "design patterns" among mashups. That is, if some tool offers a template, it's likely that there is a design pattern behind that template. If time allows, I'd like to study at the least the following frameworks. openkapow is one such system. I want to look at the ones highlighted in John Musser's recent presentation at Web 2.0 Expo. See Open APIs Talk at Web 2.0 Expo and specifically the quote from Digg floats API, phishing mashups to come:
I'm already studying Yahoo! Pipes, Kapow, Dapper, and QEDWiki but have yet to look at:
How well do these tools work? We'll see.
I'm working today on the first draft of Chapter 9 "Dissecting mashups and remixes". Ideally, I'd like to create the equivalent of the Gang of Four's Design Patterns for mashups. Such a project is long-term effort. For this chapter, I suggest finding several emerging patterns from an analysis of a handful of specific mashups. I will also outline how we can look for patterns latent in the ProgrammableWeb database of mashups.
Where we can look for analyses of mashup-related patterns?