WebSheets: Web Applications for Non-Programmers

Spreadsheets are a very successful programming paradigm. Their success stems from user's familiarity with tabular data, and their previous experience in performing manual computations on such data. Since tabular data is familiar to users in the context of web applications as well, we propose WebSheets, a new paradigm for developing web applications using a spreadsheet-like language. WebSheets can enable simple web applications to be developed without "programming," in much the same way that non-programmers create budgets or expense reports using spreadsheets. More importantly, WebSheets enable users to express fine-grained privacy policies on their data in a simple manner, thus putting them in charge of their own privacy and security concerns.