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ABSTRACT: Task-specific application development environments enable end
users to create their own applications. This is advantageous in two
ways: users can draw on their own rich task knowledge to create the
applications they really want, and reliance on the scarce, expensive
expertise of professional programmers is greatly reduced. Extensible
systems such as spreadsheets and statistical packages provide a good
model for application construction as they allow end users to create
complete applications. Such environments eliminate the need for separate
user interface builders; the interface is seamlessly created as the
application is developed. In this `Zen' process, there is little
difference between application development and user interface
development. Further barriers are broken down by creating application
development components that can continually be edited and refined, so
that distinctions among `editing', `building', `application
construction', and `finished application' begin to disappear. The
authors describe ACE, an architecture for building task-specific
applications, and the software libraries they have developed to
implement this architecture. They show how ACE supports the building of
task-specific applications via a range of extension mechanisms from
interactive editing by end users to programmer-defined subclassing
System Sciences, 1992. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Hawaii International Conference on; 02/1992
