FAR: An End-User Language to Support Cottage E-Services

(Click on the image for a full-sized version.)

The FAR research project is about devising end-user programming devices for cottage e-business.

E-commerce has begun to evolve beyond simple web page to more sophisticated ways of conducting e-bueinss transactions, such as through electronic advertising, negotiation, and delivery. However, to participate in these advances requires the skills of professional programmers, and end-user owners of small bueinsses often cannot justify this expense.

To solve this problem, we are working on a language called "FAR" (Formulas And Rules), which is an end-user language to offer and deliver e-services. The novel aspects of FAR are its support of small e-services and its multiparadigm approach to combining ideas from spreadsheets and rule-based programming with drag-and-drop web page layout devices.

To use FAR, an end user lays out a custom-tailored web page, and uses formulas and rules to determine content dynamically at document delivery time. The web page (or actually, an XML page which can be translated to a web page) will be created and delivered when a request for the service arrives.

FAR reports and screen shots:

• The same Webpage screenshot as above (shot on Mar. 11, 2001.)
• A Rules screenshot on Mar. 11, 2001.
• IEEE conference paper describing FAR. To appear at the IEEE Symposia on Human-Centric Languages and Environments (formerly known as the IEEE Visual Languages Symposium).
• Tech report #01-60-07 of March 11, 2001 (this is an earlier version of the conference paper above).
• The outcome of the Representation Design Benchmarks evaluation.
• Final report on the FAR language, evaluation, and implementation (includes all of the above and more).

Researchers involved

• Margaret Burnett, Oregon State University (principal investigator).
• Rajeev Pandey, Hewlett-Packard (research collaborator).
• Sudheer Kumar Chekka, Oregon State University (graduate student).
• Additional collaborators would be welcome. Please contact Margaret Burnett (burnett@cs.orst.edu) if you are interested.

Technology behind the scenes

• The e-services aspect is supported behind the scenes by Hewlett-Packard's e-speak, a freely-available middleware platform for the creation, composition, mediation, virtualization, management, and accessing of Internet-based services
• FAR uses XML for a variety of devices, including communicating with other e-services, delivering services, and storing the end user's programs.
• For internal users: Additional technical information about the implementation.