Software environments that support end-user development

An important challenge for the coming years is to develop environments that allow people without particular background in programming to develop and tailor their own applications. The aim is empowering people to flexibly employ advanced information and communication technologies. In this direction the European Community has recently funded EUD-Net, a Network of Excellence on End-User Development (EUD). In this paper, we discuss a framework for EUD and present our current work to design environments that support the activities of a special category of end-users, called domain-expert users, with the objective of easing the way these users work with computers.