Object spreadsheets: a new computational model for end-user development of data-centric web applications
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Object spreadsheets.pdf
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273.36 KB
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Author(s)
McCutchen, Richard Matthew
Itzhaky, Shachar
Jackson, Daniel
Date Issued
November 2016
Journal
Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software - Onward! 2016
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Citation
McCutchen, Matt, et al. "Object Spreadsheets: A New Computational Model for End-User Development of Data-Centric Web Applications." Onward! 2016 Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software, 2-4 November, 2016, Amsterdam, Netherlands, ACM Press, 2016, pp. 112–27.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Spreadsheets offer many advantages as the computational and data-storage engine for applications that are authored by end users. Paradoxically, however, their main failing in this regard is their computational model. Despite being used in almost all cases to represent data that is essentially relational (with some hierarchical structuring), the spreadsheet model treats the two-dimensional grid as largely unstructured, with formulas linking cells in an ad hoc way.
This paper reports on a quest to rethink the spreadsheet model. The model we propose supports not only conventional flat tables, but also nested variable-size lists and object references. It includes a formula language suited to the data model and procedures to specify updates.
The model has been implemented in a tool called Object Spreadsheets, which is intended for the development of data-centric web applications. We describe several example applications we built using the tool to demonstrate its applicability.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/2986012.2986018
