Managing non-native widgets in model-based UI engineering

Abstract

This paper sets out to describe on-going research and development activities aiming to provide new insights to building advanced user interfaces by assembling diverse widgets. To this end, we draw upon the relative merits and drawbacks of the two dominant approaches for developing interactive applications, namely toolkit programming and model-based user interface engineering. We motivate the problem by considering a simple example representative of what toolkit programming may deliver and then contrast its implications on prevailing model-based UI principles and practice. Our analysis reveals the key role of widget abstraction in developing specification-based tools to manage radically different widget sets in a uniform manner. The ultimate goal of this work is to extend MBUI engineering approaches so as to enable them to take account of richer interaction vocabularies becoming increasingly available.

Seamless integration of heterogeneous UI components

“…This platform, whose focus is on multi-modal interactions with different hardware de- vices, allows components implemented with different technologies to communicate via exposed interfaces and provides tool support for creating the glue layer for making the components cooperate. The approach described in [12] focuses on integrating widgets from heterogeneous widgets platforms by using abstract models of those widgets and combines those models with MDA methods.…”

Seamlessly integrated, but loosely coupled

“…This platform allows components implemented with different technologies to communicate via exposed interfaces. The approach described in [5] focuses on integrating widgets from heterogeneous widgets platforms by using abstract models of those widgets and combines those models with MDA methods.…”