Nonprogrammer web application development

We propose to investigate the feasibility of nonprogrammer web application development. The main target audience for this research is webmasters without programming experience - a group likely to be interested in building web applications. We choose a subset of web applications as the target for our analysis: basic web-based data collection, storage & retrieval applications. We propose to study the mental models of our target audience, collect requirements for a sufficiently powerful end-user programming tool, evaluate new programming paradigms, and implement a proof-of-concept prototype using participatory design techniques.

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