How do you benefit from using a Mashup ?

Until recently, most data on the web was posted as monolithic documents structured around the de facto HTML markup language, a format ill suited for reusing and manipulating data for building derivative applications.

With the major shift of providing software as services, an unlimited number of data service providers can now be leveraged using industry accepted standards to create elaborate Mashup applications.

Among the many benefits of using a Mashup approach :

• Minimized application data management: Information goes stale very fast in this day and age, by leveraging third party data providers you can ensure reduced costs related to maintaining and updating your own data repositories.
• Reduced development effort: Tailoring data to a particular application often implies lengthy development times, customizing data sets through most Mashup sources or web service API's, involves taking advantage of business logic which has been thoroughly tested and designed to solve a particular domain problem, and is maintained by a specialized service provider.
• Unlimited data sources based on standards: Once your applications are structured as Mashups, swapping between the growing number of data sources available on the web can create an exponential number of possibilities for all your developments, since all providers are based on the same industry standards.

Now that you know what you stand to gain from using a Mashup technique, lets take a look at what you need to get started.

Read further on : What do you need to build a Mashup ?