Building Multi-Platform User Interfaces with UIML

Abstract

There has been a widespread emergence of computing devices in the past few years that go beyond the capabilities of traditional desktop computers. However, users want to use the same kinds of applications and access the same data and information on these appliances that they can access on their desktop computers. The user interfaces for these platforms go beyond the traditional interaction metaphors. It is a challenge to build User Interfaces (UIs) for these devices of differing capabilities that allow the end users to perform the same kinds of tasks. The User Interface Markup Language (UIML) is an XML-based language that allows the canonical description of UIs for different platforms. We describe the language features of UIML that facilitate the development of multi-platform UIs. We also describe the key aspects of our approach that makes UIML succeed where previous approaches failed, namely the division in the representation of a UI, the use of a generic vocabulary, and an integrated development environment specifically designed for transformation-based UI development. Finally we describe the initial details of a multi-step usability engineering process for building multi-platform UI using UIML.Keywords: Multi-Platform User Interfaces, Transformations, UIML, Physical Model, Logical Model, Usability Engineering. INTRODUCTIONIt is difficult to develop an application for multi-platform deployment without duplicating development effort. Advances in electronics, communications, and the fast growth of the Internet have made the use of a wide variety of computing devices an everyday occurance. Furthermore, users expect to remotely access their data from any of these devices (e.g. desktop computer, laptop, handheld, phone, etc.). Developers now face the daunting task to build user interfaces that must work in multiple devices. To address the need for a uniform language for building multi-platform applications, we have developed the User Interface Markup Language (UIML). In this paper we discuss our research in creating such language, some of the support tools available, and describe our approach towards creating a new user interface design methodology to build multi-platform user interfaces.UIML is a single language for building user interfaces for any device. UIML emphasizes the separation of concerns of an interactive application in such a way that moving one program from one platform to another (see our definition of platform in the next section) might require only small or no changes at all. Furthermore, because it is based on XML, it is easy to write transformations that take the language from one abstract representation to a more concrete representation. The tools built around UIML extend the language with the use of transformations that afford the developer the creation of user interfaces with a single language that will execute in multiple platforms.The approach taken with UIML is that of building an application using a generic vocabulary that could then be rendered for multiple platforms. Using a gen...

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