Declarative setup-free web application prototyping combining local and cloud datastores

The trend of “open data” coupled with the recent advancement in web development technologies and the proliferation of JavaScript frameworks has helped popularize programming of interactive web applications. Still, some of the common features of today's web applications that access data from own data stores or from web services require a complex setup or a significant amount of programming knowledge, and thus make it hard for developers to quickly prototype applications and iterate on solutions. Therefore, we propose Endev, a declarative framework for prototyping applications that use cloud data storage or web service data. By not needing to write any JavaScript code or set up any servers, Endev provides a low learning threshold. We show that Endev is perceived useful and easy to use through a study with 15 developers.