So far we’ve looked at the directory of mashups or collections of mashups grouped by tags or vertical markets. Let’s consider how ProgrammableWeb displays a mashup profile.
You can find a profile for a given mashup here:
http://www.programmableweb.com/mashup/{mashup-handle}
For example, the profile for the Flash Earth mashup is here:
http://www.programmableweb.com/mashup/flash-earth
What do you find on the mashup profile page? For each mashup, you get the following:
A description
A screenshot
The APIs involved in the mashup
Any tags for the mashup
The URL of the mashup
When it was added and who added it
Related mashups
Associated comments and a rating (as a registered user, you can contribute comments and rate the mashup)
In this case, you learn that Flash Earth is a “[z]oomable mashup of Google Maps, Virtual Earth, and other satellite imagery through a Flash application” found here:
Tagged with the tag mashup, it involves the following APIs: Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, NASA, OpenLayers, and Yahoo! Maps. Moreover, you learn that Flash Earth is one of the most popular mashups on ProgrammableWeb.
In Chapter 13, you will take a closer look at online maps. Without figuring out how the various online map APIs actually work, you can—through playing with Flash Earth—learn that it is possible to extract tiles that make up various mapping APIs (for example, Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and Microsoft Virtual Earth) and recombine them in a Flash interface. (Figuring out exactly how it’s done is not necessarily so easy to do, though.) Flash Earth is a powerful demonstration of what is technically possible with online maps in a mashup.