Service Composition for Non-programmers: Prospects, Problems, and Design Recommendations

Namoun, Abdallah; Nestler, Tobias; Angeli, Antonella De

doi:10.1109/ecows.2010.17

Cited by 41 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Given different mashup scenarios, surprisingly, participants quickly understood that components had to be linked together so that information could flow between components thus making the necessary connections. The lack of this understanding and ability is a well-acknowledged problem evidenced in several other user studies of EUD tools [Namoun et al 2010b]. Our observations indicate that the key to solve this problem is: (i) to alleviate users from specifying data mappings by adopting a by-reference data passing paradigm and (ii) the purposeful design of the Web services to be mashed up.…”

Section: Domain-specific Mashupsmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…One of the lessons we learned in this context is that mashup tools (including our own) are too technical for end-users and, as a consequence, end-users are not able to: (i) understand what exactly they can do with the tool and (ii) how to do it. This observation is backed by Namoun et al [2010b], who performed a set of user studies to understand how end-users perceive mashups and concluded that they generally lack an understanding of what, for instance, Web services are, and of how these can be integrated to form new logics (e.g., via data or control flows). Yet, they also identified a positive attitude of end-users toward these new kinds of software development tools and the necessary curiosity to start "playing" with them, which we consider a necessary requirement for our work.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Conceptual Development of Custom, Domain-Specific Mashup Platforms

2014

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Despite the common claim by mashup platforms that they enable end-users to develop their own software, in practice end-users still don't develop their own mashups, as the highly technical or inexistent user bases of today's mashup platforms testify. The key shortcoming of current platforms is their general-purpose nature, that privileges expressive power over intuitiveness. In our prior work, we have demonstrated that a domainspecific mashup approach, which privileges intuitiveness over expressive power, has much more potential to enable end-user development (EUD). The problem is that developing mashup platforms-domain-specific or not-is complex and time consuming. In addition, domain-specific mashup platforms by their very nature target only a small user basis, that is, the experts of the target domain, which makes their development not sustainable if it is not adequately supported and automated.With this article, we aim to make the development of custom, domain-specific mashup platforms costeffective. We describe a mashup tool development kit (MDK) that is able to automatically generate a mashup platform (comprising custom mashup and component description languages and design-time and runtime environments) from a conceptual design and to provision it as a service. We equip the kit with a dedicated development methodology and demonstrate the applicability and viability of the approach with the help of two case studies.

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Section: Domain-specific Mashupsmentioning

confidence: 90%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptual Development of Custom, Domain-Specific Mashup Platforms

2014

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“…The main problem of these tools, according to a recent study conducted by Namoun et. al., is the fact that the wiring paradigm is difficult to understand by non-programmers [25].…”

Section: Overview Of Existing Eup Approaches For Mashupsmentioning

confidence: 99%

End-User Programming for Web Mashups

Aghaee

Pautasso

2012

Current Trends in Web Engineering

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Abstract. Mashup is defined as the practice of lightweight composition, serendipitous reuse, and user-centric development on the Web. In spite of the fact that the development of mashups is rather simple due to the reuse of all the required layers of a Web application (functionality, data, and user interface), it still requires programming experience. This is a significant hurdle for non-programmers (end-users with minimal or no programming experience), who constitute the majority of Web users. To cope with this, an End-User Programming (EUP) tool can be designed to reduce the barriers of mashup development, in a way that even non-programmers will be able to create innovative, feature-rich mashups. In this paper, we give an overview of the existing EUP approaches for mashup development, as well as a list of open research challenges.

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“…Among the simplification approaches, the business process management and service computing communities have focused on abstracting process development and service composition into activities, as well as control and data flows. However, these are still challenging tasks even for expert developers [1,2]. Traditional reuse approaches, in the form of program libraries, services, or templates (such as generics in Java or process templates in workflows) have targeted developers rather than end-users.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

End-User Requirements for Wisdom-Aware EUD

Angeli

Battocchi

Chowdhury

et al. 2011

End-User Development

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Abstract. This paper presents requirements elicitation study for a EUD tool for composing service-based applications. WIRE aims at enabling EUD by harvesting and recommending community composition knowledge (the wisdom), thus facilitating knowledge transfer from developers to end-users. The idea was evaluated with 10 contextual interviews to accountants, eliciting a rich set of information, which can lead to requirements for Wisdom-Aware EUD.

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Service Composition for Non-programmers: Prospects, Problems, and Design Recommendations

Cited by 41 publications

References 15 publications

Conceptual Development of Custom, Domain-Specific Mashup Platforms

Conceptual Development of Custom, Domain-Specific Mashup Platforms

End-User Programming for Web Mashups

End-User Requirements for Wisdom-Aware EUD

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