FAR: an end-user language to support cottage e-services

E-commerce has begun to evolve beyond simple web pages to more sophisticated ways of conducting e-business 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 businesses often cannot justify this expense. In this paper, we present FAR, 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.