Development of software systems is one of the largest and most important sectors of the U.S. economy and one where the U.S. retains a substantial competitive advantage. Application interface work constitutes a large fraction of the $ billions spent annually by government agencies, contractors and private developers. Graphical interface builders aim to reduce this effort substantially while improving the quality of the resulting interfaces. They should support large systems built using multiple languages and running concurrently on heterogeneous networks. Inter- face prototypes should lead smoothly into fully functional, customizable applica- tions. Builders must provide suitable abstractions for window systems, application interfaces and event handling in order to provide the requisite portability and flexibility. No system to date has attempted this kind of flexibility in the complex environments found for large software systems. Our approach is termed the Composable Interactor Framework (CIF) and is based on the dual notions of general, abstract interactor elements and a customizable and combinable object framework. CIFs combine the portability and abstraction of User Interface Management Systems with the application-customizable interface and element combinability of systems lacking strict separation of presentation and application.
Benefit: The research proposed here will lead to a platform/environment-independent software builder which, by direct manipulation, will quickly produce prototypes and then support their transformation into final systems. A builder developed in Phase II will have the potential to unite the smaller niches currently served by existing GUI builders into a single vast market. Early prototypes of the builder will be used to develop the final builder as well as other applications we intend to market.
Keywords: Builder, Builder, deveApplications, graphical, GUI, software, User Interface Management Systems, UIMS, User, interface
