A New End-User Composition Model to Empower Knowledge Workers to Develop Rich Internet Applications

Enabling real end-user programming development is the next logical stage in the evolution of Internetwide service-based applications. Even so, the vision of end users programming their own web-based solutions has not yet materialized. This will continue to be so unless both industry and the research community rise to the ambitious challenge of devising an end-to-end compositional model for developing a new age of end-user web application development tools. This paper describes a new composition model designed to empower programming-illiterate end users to create and share their own off-the-shelf rich Internet applications in a fully visual fashion. This paper presents the main insights and outcomes of our research and development efforts as part of a number of successful European Union research projects. A framework implementing this model was developed as part of the European Seventh Framework Programme FAST Project and the Spanish EzWeb Project and allowed us to validate the rationale behind our approach.

Supporting End-User Development through a New Composition Model: An Empirical Study

End-user development (EUD) is much hyped, and its impact has outstripped even the most optimistic forecasts. Even so, the vision of end users programming their own solutions has not yet materialized. This will continue to be so unless we in both industry and the research community set ourselves the ambitious challenge of devising end to end an end-user application development model for developing a new age of EUD tools. We have embarked on this venture, and this paper presents the main insights and outcomes of our research and development efforts as part of a number of successful EU research projects. Our proposal not only aims to reshape software engineering to meet the needs of EUD but also to refashion its components as solution building blocks instead of programs and software developments. This way, end users will really be empowered to build solutions based on artefacts akin to their expertise and understanding of ideal solutions