Programming by a sample

Abstract

Source-code examples of APIs enable developers to quickly gain a gestalt understanding of a library's functionality, and they support organically creating applications by incrementally modifying a functional starting point. As an increasing number of web sites provide APIs, significant latent value lies in connecting the complementary representations between site and service -in essence, enabling sites themselves to be the example corpus. We introduce d.mix, a tool for creating web mashups that leverages this site-to-service correspondence. With d.mix, users browse annotated web sites and select elements to sample. d.mix's sampling mechanism generates the underlying service calls that yield those elements. This code can be edited, executed, and shared in d.mix's wiki-based hosting environment. This sampling approach leverages pre-existing web sites as example sets and supports fluid composition and modification of examples. An initial study with eight participants found d.mix to enable rapid experimentation, and suggested avenues for improving its annotation mechanism.

Task Automation Intelligent Agents: A Review

“…The user browses annotated websites and selects samples, and d.mix's sampling mechanism generates the underlying service calls that yield those elements. The limitations of this system are that the coexistence of two different sampling strategies confused the tool on how to separate a dataset; in a user study, participants had difficulty switching between multiple languages interspersed in a single page; documentation and error handling in the wiki environment was insufficient compared to other tools; and wiki-hosted applications were not scaled well beyond prototypes for a few users, similarly because a user study was performed instead of usability study which differs in goals, methods, and design process stages [39]. CoScripter developed a collaborative scripting environment for recording, automating, and sharing web-based processes [40].…”

Modeling Visual Containment for Web Page Layout Optimization

“…For data-driven GUI design, d.mix [HWCK07] samples Web APIs on various external sites to build a personalized mashup view. Pix2code [Bel18] generates a code that can be rendered to reproduce a given GUI screenshot.…”

Chameleon: Bringing Interactivity to Static Digital Documents

“…However, the primary goal of Wincuts was to optimize screen real estate during, for example, document creation, rather than to replace static content with interactive content for explorable explanations. In ways similar to Wincuts, tools like d.mix [27] or Clip, Connect, Clone [20] mix information from multiple web pages to create mashups: web pages juxtaposing elements from others [11]. In contrast, Chameleon transcludes HTML content using dynamic layering onto figures of static documents.…”