LUCENT SOFTWARE LETS COMPUTER USERS CREATE CODELESS PROGRAMS.

Byline: Sabra Chartrand The New York Times

As technology becomes increasingly user-friendly, products are evolving to allow people to make their computers work for them in ways that previously required an expert programmer. Already, off-the-shelf kits let novices create World Wide Web home pages after clicking, dragging and dropping the right icons into place. No more need to learn HTML, or hypertext markup language.

Now Lucent Technologies Inc., a former division of AT&T, owns a similar technology for object-oriented programming language, which assembles bundles of programming code and functions for reuse in the creation of more than one application.

Two AT&T engineers have patented a technique they have named ``elastic objects'' because their bundles are adaptable. The technology is designed to be used in packaged products that business people or others can buy to create their own programs just by clicking on a menu of prepared objects. Users won't have to write any computer code.

``When the objects are created we put them in a palate,'' explained one of the inventors, Daniel Hurley, a systems engineer and programmer at AT&T.

``You'd use a mouse to drag the object off the palate and onto a design screen. If it is a database query object, when you connect the object to a particular table on a data base, it will automatically acquire outlets corresponding to the fields in that database.''

In other words, the query object can adapt to the connections between it and another object. More important, the query object is an established part of the kit: All a user has to do is click on it.

``The value of this is that the user, who is not a programmer but understands the problem he is trying to solve, has a general-purpose, flexible object on the palate which he pulls off and strings together without writing code,'' Hurley said.

And the objects grow.

``Our objects frequently have only one outlet, but when you make a connection to an appropriate second object, suddenly the first object acquires appropriate additional outlets, and you can use these to connect to other objects. Depending on the use, it will spawn additional outlets.''

He offered an example.

``Say you want to build a log-in process, so a user has to log in,'' he said. The builder would pull a dialogue-manager object, a query object and a validation object off the palate. By stringing them together, the user would generate outlets that would accept, search for and confirm a name and password.

The log-in process could be created in a matter of minutes, Hurley said, as opposed to the hour it might take a programmer to write code for the same functions.

``I don't think we use any programming magic,'' he added. ``What makes these objects special is they respond to specific messages between objects and the design tool. They're live objects, as opposed to code.''

And they might be used as a household tool.

``Suddenly people with computers could have very elaborate phone systems at home,'' Hurley said. ``If they're not home or can't answer the phone, they can set up a system to be paged, or have the message forwarded.''

But the inventors say that software developers could use their technology, too, to tackle common programming tasks instead of writing code. Hurley and Earle West received patent 5,524,246.

Patents are available by number for $3 from the Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, D.C. 20231.