Natural End-User Development of Web Mashups

Abstract

End-User Development (EUD) can be exploited on the Web, where users have the opportunity to create niche "Web Mashup" applications as a means to address their long tail of situational needs in different domains of application. In this paper, we describe the design and evaluation of NaturalMash, an innovative EUD system for mashups. NaturalMash provides a high level of expressive power while it is still usable by non-professional users. This clearly distinguishes NaturalMash from existing mashup EUD tools that are either too limited or highly specialized for inexperienced users. The NaturalMash user interface efficiently combines different techniques such as live programming, natural language programming, What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG), and Programming by Demonstration (PbD). The design of NaturalMash adopts a formative evaluation approach, and has completed two design and evaluation iterations. The paper reports the results of the last formative evaluation and discusses the implications of the findings. The results are promising and suggest that the proposed system has a short and gentle learning curve and enables even non-professional users to rapidly build useful mashups.

A Web Services Infrastructure for the Management of Mashup Interfaces

“…In [1] an environment called NaturalMash is created which allows the construction of mashup user interfaces by means of widget type components chosen from a pallet. These components can be dragged and dropped in the workspace allowing users to design their own manipulation environment.…”

Mobile Search through Dynamic Mashups

“…The concepts expressed in the proposed mashup model allow establishing a new paradigm called Integration Paradigm, which combine WYSIWYG [3] and Live composition (liveness level ) [8], In this way, this paradigm merge the development and execution environments, i.e., make the integration of the components directly at runtime without the need to define some other environment to map data flows and control. More precisely, Integration Paradigm: defines an integration logic among components, and automates processes like: establish the data and control flow, data mapping, assign events to the components and UI's synchronization.…”

“…In order to solve the stated problem, the following hypothesis is proposed: it is possible to improve the mobile search user experience if users are able to refine or modify the returned results, which are shown as a mashup, based on their search intentions and goals, until he meets their real need. Traditionally the existing mashups tools, such as: Yahoo Pipes, Mashart [1], iMashup [2] and NaturalMash [3] are targeted to users with technical composition knowledge. However, in these approaches users are highly involved in technical activities, requiring that they have a certain level of knowledge in composition to correctly perform a mashup.…”

Non-Programmers Composing Software Services: A Confirmatory Study of the Mental Models and Design Challenges

“…Aghaee et al [54] and Aghaee and Pautasso [55] discussed the design and evaluation of NaturalMash, a mashup tool that combines a controlled natural language and the What You See Is What You Get (i.e., WYSIWYG) development approach to enable non-programmers to assume interactive mashup integration. Following the methodology proposed by Namoun et al [11], the tool employed an iterative, user-centered design approach.…”

“…Following the methodology proposed by Namoun et al [11], the tool employed an iterative, user-centered design approach. The key features introduced in the tool that attempt to lower programming barriers are proactive feedback, runtime view, auto completion of compositions, and service discovery using natural language [54,56]. However, the authors did not reason through the strategies and challenges non-programmers encountered.…”