This talk will focus on the modern Mashup: the idea behind them, what makes them interesting and successful, and what it takes to build one yourself.

Modern database-backed application frameworks like Ruby on Rails are particularly well-suited for building Mashups. Rails offers excellent JavaScript and Ajax support, includes a framework for consuming XML Web services, provides out-of-the-box tools for serving RESTful XML Web Services, and has a powerful ORM framework for managing all of the data and relationships that are common to Mashups.

The first part of this talk will review these various aspects of Mashups and how they work. The second part will review an example Mashup application built in Ruby on Rails, which will highlight many of the common requirements with a focus on modeling, data caching, and other database-related concerns. The final part of the talk will be open for questions.