Object Spreadsheets
Object Spreadsheets (formerly Relational Spreadsheets) is an enhanced spreadsheet tool with support for storing and manipulating structured data. End-user developers can use it directly to work with a data set, or to build a web application that offers constrained view and update access to a larger population of users.
As of December 2015, we have a prototype of the spreadsheet tool that we believe demonstrates the basic vision pretty compellingly, though it is missing developer aids for formula building and many other smaller features that would improve its usability. Completely missing at this point are (1) the ability to edit stored procedures via the spreadsheet UI and (2) integration with a UI builder to design the application UI. To demonstrate the applicability of the tool, we have built several example applications, writing the procedures and the application UI by hand; these are included with the prototype.
We would welcome your feedback on this work, and we’ll provide support for the prototype subject to our research priorities; in either case, please email us.
Available materials
- Our Onward 2016 paper with more information about the problem, design, evaluation, and related work.
- Matt’s master’s thesis: the main attraction here is a rigorous specification of the data model and computation semantics.
- The prototype implementation, which includes a start page with demos, basic usage instructions, and links to reference materials:
- Public hosted instance (updated 2016-10-12). Notice: This site has no access control, so please use discretion in what data you enter. Also, we may delete your data at any time. If the site is broken or contains inappropriate content, please email us.
- Source repository.
- A video demonstrating how to build a small example application (9 minutes), which is also linked from the start page of the prototype.
Acknowledgments
This project is supported by a grant from Wistron Corporation as part of a collaboration between Wistron and MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. This project also received partial support from the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CCF-1438982.