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 solution

End-user composition of interactive applications through actionable UI components

Developing interactive systems to access and manipulate data is a very tough task. In particular, the development of user interfaces (UIs) is one of the most time-consuming activities in the software lifecycle. This is even more demanding when data have to be retrieved by accessing flexibly different online resources. Indeed, software development is moving more and more toward composite applications that aggregate on the fly specific Web services and APIs. In this article, we present a mashup model that describes the integration, at the presentation layer, of UI components. The goal is to allow non-technical end users to visualize and manipulate (i.e., to perform actions on) the data displayed by the components, which thus become actionable UI components. This article shows how the model has guided the development of a mashup platform through which non-technical end users can create component-based interactive workspaces via the aggregation and manipulation of data fetched from distributed online resources. Due to the abundance of online data sources, facilitating the creation of such interactive workspaces is a very relevant need that emerges in different contexts. A utilization study has been performed in order to assess the benefits of the proposed model and of the Actionable UI Components; participants were required to perform real tasks using the mashup platform. The study results are reported and discussed

Abmash: Mashing Up Legacy Web Applications by Automated Imitation of Human Actions

Many business web-based applications do not offer applications programming interfaces (APIs) to enable other applications to access their data and functions in a programmatic manner. This makes their composition difficult (for instance to synchronize data between two applications). To address this challenge, this paper presents Abmash, an approach to facilitate the integration of such legacy web applications by automatically imitating human interactions with them. By automatically interacting with the graphical user interface (GUI) of web applications, the system supports all forms of integrations including bi-directional interactions and is able to interact with AJAX-based applications. Furthermore, the integration programs are easy to write since they deal with end-user, visual user-interface elements. The integration code is simple enough to be called a "mashup".Comment: Software: Practice and Experience (2013)

User Identity Issues in Mashups for Learning Experiences using IMS Learning Design

The combination of services that provide personal information in technologies such as educational mashups brings some issues in the management of users' identity and authorization. This article presents a scenario based on the fact that an IMS LD server requires information relevant to each learner, and this information is provided by external services. This scenario allows to describe the problems of user correspondence, authenticated data retrieval, and remote account creation; a solution using technologies currently available is provided for each, as well as recommendations to take into account in similar scenarios.This work has been partially funded by the Project Learn3 (TIN2008-05163/TSI) from the Plan Nacional I+D+I, the Spanish National Project FLEXO (TSI-020301-2008-19,www.ines.org.es/flexo) and ”Investigación y Desarrollo de Tecnologías para el e-Learning en la Comunidad de Madrid” funded by the Madrid Regional Government under grant No. S2009/TIC-1650.Publicad

Implementation of end-user development success factors in mashup development environments

[EN] The Future Internet is expected to be composed of a mesh of interoperable web services accessed from all over the Web. This approach has been supported by many software providers who have provided a wide range of mash up tools for creating composite applications based on components prepared by the respective provider. These tools aim to achieve the end-user development (EUD) of rich internet applications (RIA); however, most, having failed to meet the needs of end users without programming knowledge, have been unsuccessful. Thus, many studies have investigated success factors in order to propose scales of success factor objectives and assess the adequacy of mashup tools for their purpose. After reviewing much of the available literature, this paper proposes a new success factor scale based on human factors, human-computer interaction (HCI) factors and the specialization-functionality relationship. It brings together all these factors, offering a general conception of EUD success factors. The proposed scale was applied in an empirical study on current EUD tools, which found that today's EUD tools have many shortcomings. In order to achieve an acceptable success rate among end users, we then designed a mashup tool architecture, called FAST-Wirecloud, which was built taking into account the proposed EUD success factor scale. The results of a new empirical study carried out using this tool have demonstrated that users are better able to successfully develop their composite applications and that FAST-Wirecloud has scored higher than all the other tools under study on all scales of measurement, and particularly on the scale proposed in this paper. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This research was partially supported by the European Union co-funded IST projects FAST: Fast and Advanced Storyboard Tools (GA 216048), FI-WARE: Future Internet Core Platform (GA 285248) and FI-CORE: Future Internet - Core (GA 632893). The FI-WARE and FI-CORE projects are part of the European Commission's Futuree Internet Public-Private Partnership (FI-PPP) initiative.Lizcano, D.; López, G.; Soriano, J.; Lloret, J. (2016). Implementation of end-user development success factors in mashup development environments. Computer Standards & Interfaces. 47:1-18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csi.2016.02.006S1184

Will this work for Susan? Challenges for delivering usable and useful generic linked data browsers

While we witness an explosion of exploration tools for simple datasets on Web 2.0 designed for use by ordinary citizens, the goal of a usable interface for supporting navigation and sense-making over arbitrary linked data has remained elusive. The purpose of this paper is to analyse why - what makes exploring linked data so hard? Through a user-centered use case scenario, we work through requirements for sense making with data to extract functional requirements and to compare these against our tools to see what challenges emerge to deliver a useful, usable knowledge building experience with linked data. We present presentation layer and heterogeneous data integration challenges and offer practical considerations for moving forward to effective linked data sensemaking tools

Role-Based Enterprise Mashups with State Sharing, Preservation and Restoration Support for Multi-Instance Executions

Veebimaastikul suurt populaarsust kogunud tavatarbijatele suunatud vidinapõhised veebi-rakendused on loonud soodsa pinnase üldotstarbeliste mashup’ite loomise raamistike ning tööriistade tekkeks. Need tööriistad on eelkõige suunatud tava-Interneti kasutajatele, et luua lihtsaid mashup-tüüpi rakendusi. Samal ajal oleks vidinapõhistest veebirakendustest kasu ka ärirakendustena. Peamiseks takistuseks ärirakenduste loomisel veebipõhiste raken-dustena on keerulisest äriloogikast tulenevad keerukad nõuded ning protsessid. Antud magistritöö uurib, kuidas teostada veebividinatel põhinevate mashup-tüüpi ärirakenduste arendamist nii, et säiluks mashup’ite loomisega seotud peamised eelised, lihtsus ja kiirus. Käesolev magistritöö pakub välja laienduse olemasolevale mashup-tüüpi raamistikule, et toetada mashup’i dekompositsiooni rollipõhisteks vaadeteks. Selleks jagatakse mashup väiksemateks vidinate komplektideks, tagades igale kasutajarollile komplekt just temale vajaminevatest vidinatest. Kuigi igal kasutajarollil võib olla erinev vaade kogu ärirakendusest, tagab käesolevas magistritöös pakutud lahendus suhtluse nende erinevate vaadete vahel. See on vajalik tagamaks mashup’i eksemplari ühtsust kõikide mashup’i vaadete vahel, olenemata sellest, millistest vidinatest antud kasutaja vaade koosneb. Lisaks pakub käesolev magistritöö välja lahenduse toetamaks mitut eksemplari samast vidinapõhisest ärirakendusest ning toetamaks ärirakenduse oleku salvestamist ning taastamist. Kuna ärirakendused on suunatud lahendamaks kasutajate igapäevaseid ülesandeid, on vajalik, et kasutaja saaks valida olemasolevate mashup’i eksemplaride hulgast või alustada uut eksemplari. Lisaks on vajalik, et kasutaja saaks igal ajahetkel rakenduse kasutamise lõpetada selliselt, et hiljem rakenduse kasutamist jätkates oleks tagatud sama rakenduse olek, millest kasutamine katkestati. Väljapakutud lahenduse toimimist testitakse näidisrakendusega, mis realiseerib krediidihalduse protsessi.Recent hype on consumer web mashups has resulted in many general-purpose mashup frameworks and tools. These tools aim at simplifying the creation of mashups targeted to mainstream Internet users. At the same time, mashups are also used for solving specific business-related tasks. Such mashups are called enterprise mashups and more sophisticated frameworks and tools have been developed to support their creation. However, similarly to traditional web application development tools, the complexity of these frameworks is hindering the main benefits associated with mashup development – agility and simplicity. This thesis aims at extending a general-purpose mashup framework to support develop-ment of enterprise mashups while still preserving the simplicity and agility of develop-ment. More specifically, this thesis describes a solution for role-based decomposition of mashups for multi-instance executions with state sharing, preservation and restoration. In this thesis, a general-purpose mashup framework is extended with the concept of roles to support multi-user interaction and decomposing complex enterprise mashups with rich interactions into role-based views. In the context of this thesis, a view is defined as a subset of widgets a mashup is made of. Hence, through views an effective mechanism is provided for decomposing enterprise mashups to mashups as simple as general-purpose mashups. Additionally, this thesis proposes a generic solution for multi-instance mashup executions. In this thesis, each workflow instance is associated with an instance of a mashup. Since situational applications target at solving users day-to-day tasks, it is necessary to support multiple instances of a mashup. Furthermore, support for multiple mashup instances leverages users’ ability to participate in multiple workflow instances and to initialize new ones. Such mashup instances are in this thesis also referred to as mashup sessions. Finally, a solution is proposed for supporting mashup state sharing, preservation and restoration. Sharing states with other users is the key mechanism for facilitating interaction and collaboration between multiple users. State preservation and restoration are needed to allow a user to stop using the mashup and to resume to the same state at a later time. The proposed solution is also validated through a proof of concept application