An approach to support automatic generation of user interfaces

Abstract

In traditional interactive programming environment, each application individually manages its interaction with the human user. The result is duplication of effort in implementing user interface code and non-uniform-hence confusing-input conventions. This paper presents an approach to support automatic generation of user interfaces in environments based on algebraic languages.The approach supports the editing model of interaction, which allows a user to view all applications as data that can be edited. An application interacts with a user by submitting variables (of arbitrary types) to a dialogue manager, which displays their presentations to the user, and offers "type-directed editing" of these presentations. Applications and dialogue manager communicate through a protocol that allows a presentation to be kept consistent with the variable it displays.A particular implementation of the approach, called Dost, has been constructed for the Xerox Development Environment and the Mesa programming language. Dost is used as a concrete example to describe the editing model, the primitives to support it, and our preliminary experience with these primitives. The approach is compared with related work, its shortcomings are discussed, and suggestions for future work are made.

Automatic Generation of Device User-Interfaces?

“…Programming Cost: Previous research, in the desktop and device domains, has measured the cost of manually implementing desktop GUIs [36,37] and the cost of specifying desktop GUIs [25] and device GUIs [38].…”

“…A few systems [8,9,17,18,20,22], on the other hand, explore the intriguing idea of automatically generating these user-interfaces. While this idea is new in the domain of mobile/device computing, it has been explored for over three decades in the realm of desktop computing [24][25][26][27]. The lessons from desktop computing tell us that automatic generation is not flexible enough to support a significant number of useful interfaces but requires substantially less coding effort for the interfaces it can create.…”

Increasing the automation of a toolkit without reducing its abstraction and user-interface flexibility

“…combo-box) and an enum [4], a hierarchical tree of widgets and a nested data structure [5], and a button and a procedure [4].…”

Flexible user interface coupling in a collaborative system

“…To illustrate, consider two popular interaction models: the traditional teletype model and the editing model [4]. Under the former, a window consists of a sequence of input and output lines of text.…”