Was checking out some interesting research sites, when I came across this project, Marmite, from Jason Hong in CMU.
"Marmite is an end-user programming system for the web that enables non-programmers to recreate some of the functionality of mashups without programming. Users construct a data-flow from a set of operators. Operators are GUI representations of web services or represent operations the local machine such as filtering or scraping information off of web pages.
Marmite is different from other mashup systems such as Yahoo Pipes!, Microsoft Popfly, and Intel MashMaker because:
- Marmite deals with both Web Services and screen-scraping methods of creating mashups.
- The state of the data is shown at each individual step.
- Fine-grain control and constant feedback between steps makes incremental programming possible (which shrinks the design/test/debug cycle).
Marmite is inspired by UNIX pipes and Apple Automator."