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A PLATFORM-INDEPENDENT USER INTERFACE DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE

Harald Stöttner
( Austria )

Johannes Kepler Universität Linz
Institut für Praktische Informatik (Systemsoftware) Altenbergerstr. 69 A - 4040 Linz/Auhof
tel:
fax:
harald.stoettner@ssw.uni-linz.ac.at

Keywords:

frameworks language concepts language implementation software engineering user interface description platform independent XML

Abstract:

This paper describes an approach for defining user interfaces in a platform-independent way. The idea is to specify user interfaces in a notation that is based on XML and contains any relevant information in a toolkit-neutral way. From this specification we can produce output for platforms such as stand-alone applications, Web-based user interfaces or formatted print output.

There is a great demand to present the data from information systems on different user interface platforms. Often the user interface of a stand-alone application and a Web-based interface are simultaneously used. In addition to this the contents must be available as a formatted output for printing. In traditional clients the layout and the behavior is redundantly hard coded in a specific language such as C++ or Java. Modifications and/or extensions of the underlying data structure require an adaptation of each single view realized in a certain technology. This results in considerable modification and migration effort.

In order to overcome these problems our idea is to describe the contents and the behavior of user interfaces in a platform-independent way and to let generic visualization components of applications access these descriptions and produce the desired output, either as Swing GUI, as Web GUI or as printer output.

An idea of our approach is to separate the elements that are identical in each view in a platform-independent description. This so-called base definition can be extended as it is known from object-oriented inheritance to customize semantical differences of each user interface. Due to this mechanism generally usable libraries can be created and applied. User interface definitions contain a set of generic elements that can be rendered to platform-specific user interfaces. Not available elements on a certain platform are emulated.

Other approaches avoid the above shortcomings but deviate from the idea of this paper. Although they deal with user interface descriptions their realization concept and their aim are different. For example UIML ( http://www.uiml.org/) describes the used parts outside the source code and renders them in a platform-specific way. It can be used to describe a user interface that is tailored for a specific platform.

A platform-independent description offers an open structure to integrate views realized with future technologies. It opens the way towards a component-based architecture of user interfaces.

The PhD work started: Nov. 2000

The submitted work will probably not be presented in the
upcoming ECOOP PhD Workshop.

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Last modified on Mon Aug 15 14:59:24 2005