Spreadsheet-driven web applications
Name
Karger_-spreadsheet-driven-web-apps.pdf
Size
1.33 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
c92d361a8fbf4d3b9efcf9d52cb49f55
Author(s)
Benson, Edward
Karger, David R.
Zhang, Amy Xian
Date Issued
October 2014
Journal
Proceedings of the 27th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '14)
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Edward Benson, Amy X. Zhang, and David R. Karger. 2014. Spreadsheet driven web applications. In Proceedings of the 27th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 97-106.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Creating and publishing read-write-compute web applications requires programming skills beyond what most end users possess. But many end users know how to make spreadsheets that act as simple information management applications, some even with computation. We present a system for creating basic web applications using such spreadsheets in place of a server and using HTML to describe the client UI. Authors connect the two by placing spreadsheet references inside HTML attributes. Data computation is provided by spreadsheet formulas. The result is a reactive read-write-compute web page without a single line of Javascript code. Nearly all of the fifteen HTML novices we studied were able to connect HTML to spreadsheets using our method with minimal instruction. We draw conclusions from their experience and discuss future extensions to this programming model.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/2642918.2647387
