Abmash: Mashing Up Legacy Web Applications by Automated Imitation of Human Actions
This addresses the challenge for businesses needing to synchronize data between web applications without APIs, offering a practical solution, though it appears incremental as it builds on automation of existing GUI interactions.
The paper tackled the problem of integrating legacy web applications lacking APIs by introducing Abmash, an approach that automates human-like interactions with GUIs, enabling bi-directional data synchronization and support for AJAX-based apps, with integration code described as simple 'mashups'.
Many business web-based applications do not offer applications programming interfaces (APIs) to enable other applications to access their data and functions in a programmatic manner. This makes their composition difficult (for instance to synchronize data between two applications). To address this challenge, this paper presents Abmash, an approach to facilitate the integration of such legacy web applications by automatically imitating human interactions with them. By automatically interacting with the graphical user interface (GUI) of web applications, the system supports all forms of integrations including bi-directional interactions and is able to interact with AJAX-based applications. Furthermore, the integration programs are easy to write since they deal with end-user, visual user-interface elements. The integration code is simple enough to be called a "mashup".