Towards a Reference Architecture for Enterprise Mashups

Mashup applications combine pieces of functionality from several existing websites to provide new integrated functionality. Existing mashup tools typically address only some aspects of the problem and use a variety of sometimes overlapping and sometimes complementary approaches that make it difficult to compare them. In this ‘work in progress’ paper, we present a first draft of one reference architecture aiming to ease this task. We also discuss in more detail two crucial layers of the architecture: the Data Mashup and Widget Assembly layers. For these layers, we identify their main design aspects and we briefly identify and compare the different approaches to address them.