[1] The term implies easy, fast integration, frequently using open application programming interfaces (open API) and data sources to produce enriched results that were not necessarily the original reason for producing the raw source data.
To be able to permanently access the data of other services, mashups are generally client applications or hosted online.
], more and more Web applications have published APIs that enable software developers to easily integrate data and functions the SOA way, instead of building them by themselves.
They generally do not require programming skills and rather support visual wiring of GUI widgets, services and components together.
Under the Web 1.0 model, organizations stored consumer data on portals and updated them regularly.
At the same time, mashups emerged, allowing mixing and matching competitors' APIs to develop new services.
Standard components and connectors enable designers to combine mashup resources in all sorts of complex ways with ease.
Mashup enablers evolved to address this problem, providing the ability to convert other kinds of data and services into mashable resources.
In fact, the most valuable information for business intelligence and decision support is often external to the organization.
Unfortunately, very few of these data sources syndicate content in RSS format and very few of these services provide publicly accessible APIs.
Portals are an older technology designed as an extension to traditional dynamic Web applications, in which the process of converting data content into marked-up Web pages is split into two phases: generation of markup "fragments" and aggregation of the fragments into pages.
Each markup fragment is generated by a "portlet", and the portal combines them into a single Web page.
Portal technology defines a complete event model covering reads and updates.
After several years of standards development, mainstream businesses are starting to adopt service-oriented architectures (SOA) to integrate disparate data by making them available as discrete Web services.