End-User Systems, Reusability, and High-Level Design
Glenn S. Fowler (gsf@research.att.com)
John J. Snyder (jjs@research.att.com)
Kiem-Phong Vo (kpv@research.att.com)
AT&T Bell Laboratories
600 Mountain Avenue
Murray Hill, NJ 07974 USA
Abstract
During the past ten years, the number of computer users has grown by
orders of magnitude. This has been brought about by dramatic increase
in computing power combined with equally dramatic decrease in hardware
costs. Beyond "stand-alone" user applications like word processing
and spreadsheets, new classes of business applications arise where
competitive advantage is created by empowering "end-users" with
instant access to relevant information. In many cases, code already
exists to access and process the desired information; the challenge is
finding a way to couple such processing capabilities to individual
user requests in a timely, specific, and friendly fashion. The keys
to such end-user systems lie in high-level design and software
reusability. This paper describes a language tool EASEL (End-User
Application System Encoding Language) for building end-user systems
and experiences in its development and deployment.
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