Review of Service Composition Interfaces
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Sanna Kotkaluoto, Juha Leino, Antti Oulasvirta, Peter Peltonen, Kari‐Jouko Räihä and Seppo Törmä Review of Service Composition Interfaces DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCES UNIVERSITY OF TAMPERE D‐2009‐7 TAMPERE 2009 UNIVERSITY OF TAMPERE DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCES SERIES OF PUBLICATIONS D – NET PUBLICATIONS D‐2009‐7, OCTOBER 2009 Sanna Kotkaluoto, Juha Leino, Antti Oulasvirta, Peter Peltonen, Kari‐Jouko Räihä and Seppo Törmä Review of Service Composition Interfaces DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCES FIN‐33014 UNIVERSITY OF TAMPERE ISBN 978‐951‐44‐7896‐3 ISSN 1795‐4274 Preface This report was produced in the LUCRE project. LUCRE stands for Local and User-Created Services. The project is part of the Flexible Services research programme, one of the programmes of the Strategic Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation in the ICT field (TIVIT) and funded by Tekes (the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation) and the participating organizations. The Flexible Service Programme creates service business activity for global markets. The programme has the aim of creating a Web of Services. The programme creates new types of ecosystems, in which the producers of services, the people that convey the service and the users all work together in unison. As part of such ecosystems, LUCRE will develop an easy-to-use, visual service creation platform to support the creation of context aware mobile services. The goal is to support user-driven open innovation: the end- users (people, local businesses, communities) will be provided with tools to compose new services or to modify existing ones. The service creation platform will build on the technology of existing mashup tools, widget frameworks, and publish/subscribe mechanisms. It will contain a range of common building blocks of context-aware services including people and groups, discussion channels, maps and location, and media. This technical report is based on Deliverable D2.1 of LUCRE. Here we review available commercial solutions for service composition as well as research published in academic forums. The purpose of this review is to understand the main categories of solutions to this problem. i Table of contents 1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................................... 1 2 Service composition ........................................................................................................................................... 3 2.1 Time of composition creation ........................................................................................................................................................ 3 2.2 Fields of research on service composition ............................................................................................................................... 4 2.3 Mashup patterns .................................................................................................................................................................................. 5 2.4 End‐user programming .................................................................................................................................................................... 5 3 Usetime service composition ........................................................................................................................ 7 3.1 Intel MashMaker .................................................................................................................................................................................. 7 3.2 Mozilla Ubiquity ................................................................................................................................................................................... 8 4 Programming by example .............................................................................................................................. 10 4.1 Programming by demonstration ............................................................................................................................................... 10 4.1.1 Karma .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 10 4.1.2 Vegemite ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 11 4.2 Example modification ..................................................................................................................................................................... 12 4.2.1 d.mix ............................................................................................................................................................................................. 12 5 Visual programming......................................................................................................................................... 14 5.1 Popfly ..................................................................................................................................................................................................... 15 5.1.1 Mashup Creator ....................................................................................................................................................................... 15 5.1.2 Service composition with Popfly Mashup Creator .................................................................................................. 18 5.1.3 Game Creator, Web Creator, and Popfly Space ......................................................................................................... 19 5.1.4 Current state ............................................................................................................................................................................. 20 5.2 Yahoo! Pipes ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 20 5.2.1 Service composition with Yahoo Pipes ......................................................................................................................... 21 5.2.2 Discovering and cloning pipes .......................................................................................................................................... 25 5.2.3 The current state of Yahoo Pipes .................................................................................................................................... 26 6 Formbased creation ........................................................................................................................................ 28 6.1 iGoogle ................................................................................................................................................................................................... 28 6.1.1 Discovering gadgets in iGoogle ........................................................................................................................................ 32 6.1.2 Building gadgets ..................................................................................................................................................................... 33 6.1.3 Popular gadget types in iGoogle ...................................................................................................................................... 35 6.1.4 Creating themes ...................................................................................................................................................................... 37 6.1.5 Social future .............................................................................................................................................................................. 37 6.2 Netvibes ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 39 6.3 Yahoo! Widgets .................................................................................................................................................................................. 43 7 Script based creation ....................................................................................................................................... 46 7.1 Firefox extensions ............................................................................................................................................................................ 46 7.1.1 Building Firefox extensions ............................................................................................................................................... 50 7.1.2 Future directions .................................................................................................................................................................... 51 7.2 Facebook .............................................................................................................................................................................................. 52 7.2.1 Using Facebook applications ............................................................................................................................................