2. Development model and technical architecture

2.1 Mashup: a tactical Web application

Mashups are essentially "tactical" applications which, in contrast to the large-scale structuring projects of enterprise IT, may only be aimed at a small community of users within the – company, sometimes extending transversally from one department to another. Designed for these user communities, mashups are often developed by the users themselves – the famous citizen-developers – to meet specific needs whose initial scope and scale would not justify recourse to the scarce and expensive resources of central IT.

As New York University professor Clay Shirky noted in his essay Situated Software, published in 2004, Web technologies and the tools and habits born of the Open Source movement encourage users, faced with these...