How Do Web-Active End-User Programmers Forage?

Web-active end-user programmers spend substantial time and cognitive effort seeking information while debugging web mashups, which are platforms for creating web applications by combining data and functionality from two or more different sources. The debugging on these platforms is challenging as end user programmers need to forage within the mashup environment to find bugs and on the web to forage for the solution to those bugs. To understand the foraging behavior of end-user programmers when debugging, we used information forging theory. Information foraging theory helps understand how users forage for information and has been successfully used to understand and model user behavior when foraging through documents, the web, user interfaces, and programming environments. Through the lens of information foraging theory, we analyzed the data from a controlled lab study of eight web-active end-user programmers. The programmers completed two debugging tasks using the Yahoo! Pipes web mashup environment. On analyzing the data, we identified three types of cues: clear, fuzzy, and elusive. Clear cues helped participants to find and fix bugs with ease while fuzzy and elusive cues led to useless foraging. We also identified the strategies used by the participants when finding and fixing bugs. Our results give us a better understanding of the programming behavior of web-active end-users and can inform researchers and professionals how to create better support for the debugging process. Further, this study methodology can be adapted by researchers to understand other aspects of programming such as implementing, reusing, and maintaining code

Web service composition: A survey of techniques and tools

Web services are a consolidated reality of the modern Web with tremendous, increasing impact on everyday computing tasks. They turned the Web into the largest, most accepted, and most vivid distributed computing platform ever. Yet, the use and integration of Web services into composite services or applications, which is a highly sensible and conceptually non-trivial task, is still not unleashing its full magnitude of power. A consolidated analysis framework that advances the fundamental understanding of Web service composition building blocks in terms of concepts, models, languages, productivity support techniques, and tools is required. This framework is necessary to enable effective exploration, understanding, assessing, comparing, and selecting service composition models, languages, techniques, platforms, and tools. This article establishes such a framework and reviews the state of the art in service composition from an unprecedented, holistic perspective

Helping end-user programmers find and fix performance problems in visual code

End-user programmers often struggle to create programs that run quickly and effectively, which can be a major deterrent in completing their tasks as desired. Current research has primarily focused on catching user mistakes, such as errors or misused formulas. However, end users deal with issues other than just correctness. In particular, there are very few tools and very little research aimed at helping end-user programmers to find and fix performance issues. This thesis details three specific methods: detecting code smells, combining static code smell detection with profiling information, and the semi-automatic or tool-guided removal of code smells. These methods have been prototyped to interface with the Labview IDE with the support of National Instruments. These methods have been evaluated through several user studies to ensure that they are effective and helpful

A NOVEL REFACTORING APPRAOCH TO REMOVE THE SMELS PRESENT IN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

Mash ups are the one which is created as a new source by using the knowledge of already existing sources. The Mash ups are used to create and develop new innovative ideas from the already existing knowledge’s. However the mash up creation by users may tend to some deficiencies which need to be concentrated to avoid the complexity. There may be a possibility of creation of smells during the mash up creation process which need to be addressed well in order to avoid the software failure. This is avoided by introducing the methodology called refactoring approach which tends to find and eliminate the possible smells which may occur at the time of mash up creation. However in programming cannot support the programming languages with different object behavior in different places. The refactoring cannot be applicable for the smells identified in the new type of programming language. It is overcome in our work by analyzing the object behavior when it is used in different places. Based on this knowledge, refactoring has been applied with the consideration of the moving the objects across different classes and modules and predict the behavior changes occurred in the programming languages. By doing so, efficient refactoring can be done which can be used for any type of programming languages in order to avoid the smells at the time of mash up creation. The experimental conducted were proves that the proposed methodology lead to better performance than the existing approach in terms of mash up creation

CAN END-USERS PROGRAM?

In recent years, personal computing has changed direction and is now more inclined towards the world of mobile computing. This means that end-users expect a simpler and more personalized experience. To achieve the highest level of customization, end-users must develop their own applications. However, end-users usually lack in having the right skills for that task. To address this problem, many end-users programming languages and frameworks have been devised. These are particularly aimed at reducing syntax and cognitive gaps. However, some of the existing solutions reduced the expressiveness of the language and thus reduced the generality of the program, while others remains too complex for end-users. In this work we devise a new framework, named Dev4Me, designed from the ground up to provide end-users a solution for developing mobile and personal apps. The framework is made up of a new form-based language, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and an execution environment. The new framework enables the users to develop, test, debug and use their own apps in a few simple steps, using familiar form filling experience

Coding Theory

This book explores the latest developments, methods, approaches, and applications of coding theory in a wide variety of fields and endeavors. It consists of seven chapters that address such topics as applications of coding theory in networking and cryptography, wireless sensor nodes in wireless body area networks, the construction of linear codes, and more

Empowering End Users in Debugging Trigger-Action Rules

End users can program trigger-action rules to personalize the joint behavior of their smart devices and online services. Trigger-action programming is, however, a complex task for non-programmers and errors made during the composition of rules may lead to unpredictable behaviors and security issues, e.g., a lamp that is continuously fashing or a door that is unexpectedly unlocked. In this paper, we introduce EUDebug, a system that enables end users to debug trigger-action rules. With EUDebug, users compose rules in a web-based application like IFTTT. EUDebug highlights possible problems that the set of all defned rules may generate and allows their step-by-step simulation. Under the hood, a hybrid Semantic Colored Petri Net (SCPN) models, checks, and simulates trigger-action rules and their interactions. An exploratory study on 15 end users shows that EUDebug helps identifying and understanding problems in trigger-action rules, which are not easily discoverable in existing platforms

Personalizing the web: A tool for empowering end-users to customize the web through browser-side modification

167 p.Web applications delegate to the browser the final rendering of their pages. Thispermits browser-based transcoding (a.k.a. Web Augmentation) that can be ultimately singularized for eachbrowser installation. This creates an opportunity for Web consumers to customize their Web experiences.This vision requires provisioning adequate tooling that makes Web Augmentation affordable to laymen.We consider this a special class of End-User Development, integrating Web Augmentation paradigms.The dominant paradigm in End-User Development is scripting languages through visual languages.This thesis advocates for a Google Chrome browser extension for Web Augmentation. This is carried outthrough WebMakeup, a visual DSL programming tool for end-users to customize their own websites.WebMakeup removes, moves and adds web nodes from different web pages in order to avoid tabswitching, scrolling, the number of clicks and cutting and pasting. Moreover, Web Augmentationextensions has difficulties in finding web elements after a website updating. As a consequence, browserextensions give up working and users might stop using these extensions. This is why two differentlocators have been implemented with the aim of improving web locator robustness

Personalizing the web: A tool for empowering end-users to customize the web through browser-side modification

167 p.Web applications delegate to the browser the final rendering of their pages. Thispermits browser-based transcoding (a.k.a. Web Augmentation) that can be ultimately singularized for eachbrowser installation. This creates an opportunity for Web consumers to customize their Web experiences.This vision requires provisioning adequate tooling that makes Web Augmentation affordable to laymen.We consider this a special class of End-User Development, integrating Web Augmentation paradigms.The dominant paradigm in End-User Development is scripting languages through visual languages.This thesis advocates for a Google Chrome browser extension for Web Augmentation. This is carried outthrough WebMakeup, a visual DSL programming tool for end-users to customize their own websites.WebMakeup removes, moves and adds web nodes from different web pages in order to avoid tabswitching, scrolling, the number of clicks and cutting and pasting. Moreover, Web Augmentationextensions has difficulties in finding web elements after a website updating. As a consequence, browserextensions give up working and users might stop using these extensions. This is why two differentlocators have been implemented with the aim of improving web locator robustness