Support for End-User Programming in a Cooperative Environment

Ivan Tomek, Adjunct Professor, Jodrey School of Computer Science, Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada, Email: ivan.tomek@acadiau.ca

Rebecca Gong, M. Sc. Student, Jodrey School of Computer Science, Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada, Email: 053276g@acadiau.ca

Elhadi Shakshuki, Associate Professor, Jodrey School of Computer Science, Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada, Email: elhadi.shakshuki@acadiau.ca

Rick Giles, Associate Professor, Jodrey School of Computer Science, Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada, Email: rick.giles@acadiau.ca

Keywords

Internet-based collaboration, end-user programmability, customizability and extendibility, virtual environments

Abstract

As Internet reaches more and more people and as globalization forces geographical barriers to disappear, Internet support for collaboration is increasingly important. This is reflected in the large number of applications developed to support it. More and more, these applications have the form of integrated environments that integrate functionalities deemed essential for the purpose by their designers. Unfortunately, requirements of all teams and users are not the same even in the same application domain, work needs and available technologies change, and environments thus need evolve as well. As a consequence, hard-coded environments that can be modified only by their developers are not a good solution. Recently, environments programmable by end-users themselves have attracted attention and an important part of our work on a prototypical collaborative environment focuses on this issue. Our paper describes this work and presents experimental tools that we developed to help end-users of our environment to program it to accommodate their needs.