User Interface Declarative Models and Development Environments: A Survey

1
User Interface Declarative Models and Development
Environments A Survey

• Paulo Pinheiro da Silva
• Department of Computer Science,
• University of Manchester

2
Outline

• Model-based user interface development
  environments (MB-UIDEs)
• Surveyed MB-UIDEs
• Declarative models
• Environments
• Conclusions

3
MB-UIDE

• A MB-UIDE is composed of
• declarative models that describe user interfaces
  (UIs)
• tools to build and run a user interface model
  (UIM).

4
User Interface Implementation in a MB-UIDE

• The three typical approaches for running a UIM

- Code Generation
- UIMS
- Runtime system
5
MB-UIDE Benefits

• Provide more abstract description of UI than
  other UI development tools.
• Facilitate the creation of methods to design and
  implement UI in a systematic way.
• Provide infrastructure to automate tasks related
  to UI design.

6
Surveyed MB-UIDEs
7
A Comparison Framework
8
A Comparison Framework
9
Models

• Models that describe similar aspects of UIs have
  several denominations.

10
Constructors
11
Notations

• Models are based on many notations
• LOTOS (TDM of ADEPT)
• OMT (AM of AME, AM of TADEUS)
• algebraic specification (AM of FUSE)
• extended CORBA IDL (AM of JANUS, AM of
  MASTERMIND)
• style rule (all models of ITS)
• MIMIC (all models of MOBI-D)
• ER (AM of TRIDENT)

12
Model Integration
13
Environments

• Design environment tools
• Implementation environment tools

14
Conclusions

• There are commercial products already using the
  MB-UIDE technology.
• However, there are aspects of MB-UIDE technology
  that must be studied to increase the acceptance
  of MB-UIDEs
• Standard notations for UIMs
• Mapping between models
• UIM post-editing problem

15
Future Work

• UML for Interactive Applications (UMLi) is a
  proposal for extending UML to provide better
  support for modelling UIs.
• Further information about UMLi can be obtained
  at
• http//img.cs.man.ac.uk/umli