Helping End-Users "Engineer" Dependable Web Applications

End-user programmers are increasingly relying on web authoring environments to create web applications. Although often consisting primarily of web pages, such applications are increasingly going further, harnessing the content available on the web through “programs” that query other web applications for information to drive other tasks. Unfortunately, errors can be pervasive in web applications, impacting their dependability. This paper reports the results of an exploratory study of end-user web application developers, performed with the aim of exposing prevalent classes of errors. The results suggest that end-users struggle the most with the identification and manipulation of variables when structuring requests to obtain data from other web sites. To address this problem, we present a family of techniques that help end user programmers perform this task, reducing possible sources of error. The techniques focus on simplification and characterization of the data that end-users mu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ISSRE
• Authors: Sebastian G. Elbaum, Kalyan-Ram Chilakamarri, Bhuvana Gopal, Gregg Rothermel
• Keywords: End-user Web Application, ISSRE 2005, Web Applications, Web Authoring Environments