Session: MCP Mashups: How AI Agents are Reviving the Programmable Web
At the risk of showing my age, I invite you to travel back with me to the early 2000s… a period of web development known as the Mashup Era. Mashups were apps that mixed and matched APIs from different vendors to create new services.
This was such an exciting time for web developers, as the possibilities seemed endless. APIs like Google Maps, Twitter, and Flickr gave developers access to data that they could use to create interactive user experiences that were simply delightful. However, the excitement eventually fizzled as developers realized they had to maintain these applications which were often side projects created for fun.
Now, 20 years later, that spark of excitement and curiosity has returned with the introduction of AI Agents. Unburdened by the need to build and maintain full systems, developers can use the MCP (Model Context Protocol) open standard to integrate data and functionality from different services. By connecting AI agents to various APIs, resources, and data sources, we get quick modern-day mashups that can accomplish any task without the maintainability headache.
In this talk, we’ll explore how AI Agents are bringing fun and creativity back to web development and giving new life to the “programmable web”.
