The SmartComposition Approach for Creating Environment-Aware Multi-screen Mashups

Mashups aim to enable non-experts to compose complex applications by combining various existing building blocks. The special case of user interface mashups is focusing on the composition of user interface components. In this paper, we present our SmartComposition approach as an UI mashup framework that supports local developers in creating environment-aware multi-screen mashups. We aim for simplicity and focus on the definition of mashup scenarios by only using HTML markup. Therefore, we facilitate Web Component technologies to build SmartComponents - the building blocks in our approach. For achieving environment-awareness, our approach integrates features of the Web of Things into mashups, such as controlling actors and accessing sensors. SmartComposition provides mashup composition by external communication configuration through markup. We additionally propose the distribution of mashup components and their communication across multiple screens using a messaging service utilizing WebSockets.