In the telecommunications industry there's a special phrase for that bit of technology that carries data from the last pole or relay box into the customer's home. It's called "the last mile" and it's often seen as one of the biggest challenges because this last step in the technology chain can be a considerable physical undertaking. In the IT industry we also have our "last mile": putting the right application in the hands of the end user. Composite applications address this "last mile", combining a rich user interface with SOA-driven application integration technology.
Composite applications are nothing new. Analysts have been talking about composite applications since the birth of the Internet and in more urgent tones during the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) generation of integration technology. Today there are plenty of consumer-focused composite applications, colloquially referred to as mashups.
