Stephen Witherden’s Website

I have seen a number of different drivers for development endeavours:. Data driven, model driven and user interface driven. I believe that for the purposes of end user development, the interface driven development method is most appropriate. In fact, I think it is the most appropriate not only for end users but for the average application programmer as well.
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This is a common analogy to building software, I thought I would use it to draw a distinction between programmers, software architects, user interface designers and graphic designers.

These four groups of people represent four distinct skill sets. Let’s see how they do building a house.
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As a programmer, I constantly hear the siren’s cry of meta modelling. Programming is all about building abstractions to represent reality. By inference, being able to abstract these abstractions results in an “application generator” (or meta application) which can be used for any purpose. Some may call this the holy grail of programming.

At least that’s the theory.
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The more I think about it, the more I believe that what I am trying to do is address a gap I see in current end user development research. In particular, I think a certain kind of application (I call it a “data-centric application” but “transaction processing system” is appropriate too) has been left out of much end user development research.
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