As easy as "Click": End-user Web engineering

We are investigating the feasibility of end-user web engineering. The main target audience for this research is webmasters without programming experience - a group likely to be interested in building web applications. Our target domain is web-based data collection and management applications. As an instrument for studying the mental models of our audience and collecting requirements for an end-user web programming tool, we are developing Click, a proof-of-concept prototype. We discuss end-user related aspects of web engineering in general and describe the design rationale for Click. In particular, we elaborate on the need for supporting evolutionary prototyping and opportunistic and ad hoc development goals. We also discuss strategies for making end-user web engineering scalable and for encouraging end-user developers to continually increase their level of sophistication.