Programming by a sample: rapidly creating web applications with d.mix

  • Authors:

  • Björn Hartmann;Leslie Wu;Kevin Collins;Scott R. Klemmer

  • Affiliations:

  • Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Source-code examples of APIs enable developers to quickly gain a gestalt understanding of a library's functionality, and they support organically creating applications by incrementally modifying a functional starting point. As an increasing number of web sites provide APIs, significantlatent value lies in connecting the complementary representations between site and service - in essence, enabling sites themselves to be the example corpus. We introduce d.mix, a tool for creating web mashups that leverages this site-to-service correspondence. With d.mix, users browse annotated web sites and select elements to sample. d.mix's sampling mechanism generates the underlying service calls that yield those elements. This code can be edited, executed, and shared in d.mix's wiki-based hosting environment. This sampling approach leverages pre-existing web sites as example sets and supports fluid composition and modification of examples. An initial study with eight participants found d.mix to enable rapid experimentation, and suggested avenues for improving its annotation mechanism.