DeployGround: A Framework for Streamlined Programming from API playgrounds to Application Deployment

Interactive web pages for learning programming languages and application programming interfaces (APIs), called “playgrounds,” allow programmers to run and edit example codes in place. Despite the benefits of this live programming experience, programmers need to leave the playground at some point and restart the development from scratch in their own programming environments. This paper proposes “DeployGround,” a framework for creating web-based tutorials that streamlines learning APIs on playgrounds and developing and deploying applications. As a case study, we created a web-based tutorial for browser-based and Node.js-based JavaScript APIs. A preliminary user study found appreciation of the streamlined and social workflow of the DeplovGround framework.