Doing the Monster Mash: A Mashup

Abstract

A long time ago, some god-like developer came up with the concept of an Application Programming Interface (API). In short, an API is nothing but a known (to those that might use it) interface to a program or system. The developer came up with this idea, and everyone saw it, and saw that it was a Good Thing™. But, in the immortal words of Dr. Leonard H. McCoy, “. . . engineers, they love to change things.” We couldn’t just stick with the term API. No, we just had to come up with something new, and that something is the term mashup. Since it’s a term that is all the rage these days, and also something that often involves JavaScript to a large degree, it’s most definitely an appropriate topic for this book. So, in this chapter, I’ll introduce the concept of the mashup, and then we’ll put that concept to use in a handy little application.