In the past few years, Microsoft and Google have made tremendous efforts for encouraging end user to develop their own websites. Microsoft FrontPage, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Google Blogger and WordPress are major products that have been developed before but limited for designing the web pages and blog management rather than developing the websites that meet the entire user needs that include e-business, security, record keeping, content management etc. Our research deals and explores non-programmer web development, the issue, in a new manner that explains how much work has been accomplished before, compares existing work and recommends that how much work can further be achieved.
Intoduction
A feasibility study is an initial study undertaken to assess a project’s viability. It can also be used to give an initial analysis/comparison of existing solutions, and can also recommend/provide the best alternate solutions.
One way of defining “programming” is as the process of transforming a mental image of desired results/output for a computer into a representation that can be understood by the computer [1]. Non programmer web development is something that is done not by a trained web programmer but by an end user. Users surfing the web and using web based applications usually know what they would like in an application/page if it is not already there. They have the scope and vision for that particular requirement, what they lack is the technical knowhow and the programming expertise to implement that requirement.
Programming for common users has always been a difficult task. There has already been a lot of research done for making programming more easy and accessible. One such research thread brings to light the advantages of letting the user demonstrate his required output by demonstrating with an example. This is called programming by example (PBE) or programming by demonstration (PBD). The concept behind some of these systems is to analyze the users’ examples and to automatically generalize the program using artificial intelligence techniques. Some surveys of PBE and PBD include [4, 5].
There are already some tools available to do this, the most common and known among them Microsoft Front Page and Macromedia Dreamweaver. Existing tools do give some options to end users for development without programming expertise but in a limited environment. These are mainly good for static web sites or pages and do not provide backend code for users to see, so this cancels the reusability of code.
There could be a programming paradigm for non programmers that could include web application customization, content management on a web site etc, this is known as end user programming [2]. End user programming (EUP) is for non programmers. Basic concept of this programming is that users can program web applications at runtime, i.e. they can program an application and keep using it at the same time. End user programmers are people who write programs as a secondary job function. These programs are written to support the goals that they have to achieve.
We propose to provide a feasibility study that provides extensive & better options for dynamic web development for end users.
Applications for tools created for non programming web development will greatly facilitate non technical web masters to maintain and manage their web sites. Also such a tool will greatly help users customize applications such as shopping carts, message boards etc [3]. Some limitations of tools based on this concept are that they cannot provide extensive, dynamic ways of web development. Also, tools can be programmed with pre defined procedures and designs and can never compete with live creative programming.
