Menu mash-up

Abstract

Parents have told you not to play with your food, but what's appropriate at the dinner table isn't necessarily applicable elsewhere. Modern culture thrives on mixing things together to create new flavours. It happened with music, and then with video, and now we're seeing it with online services. 'Mash-ups' are the latest buzzword in software development, and they are predicated on on mixing together Internet experiences that would previously have been consumed separately. Mash-ups are based on one of the fundamental tenets of Web 2.0 technology: that data contributed by a Web site's users should be easy for those users to consume in different forms. This philosophy drove sites such as Google, Flickr and Amazon to provide open application programming interfaces (APIs). "Mash-ups are about letting the user do the integration and filter their data all on their own. "Asynchronous Java and XML (AJAX) is one popular technology, enabling Web 2.0 users to manipulate online information without having to make multiple time-consuming queries to the server, as traditional HTML-based forms do. (3 pages)