An overview of GINA—the generic interactive application

GINA is an object-oriented application framework written in CommonLisp and CLOS. It is based on an interface between CommonLisp and the OSF/Motif software. The generic interactive application is executable and has a complete graphical user interface, but lacks any application-specific behaviour. New applications are created by defining subclasses of GINA classes and adding or overriding methods. The standard functionality of a typical application is already implemented in GINA. Only the differences to the standard application have to be coded. For example, commands for opening, closing, saving and creating new documents are already available in GINA. The programmer only has to write a method to translate the document contents into a stream of characters and vice versa.