The Construction of User Interfaces and the Object Paradigm

This article concerns generic tools for the construction of user interfaces: Application Frameworks and User Interface Management Systems (UIMS's). In this article, we propose a new taxonomy for these tools, identify their limitations and show how the object paradigm can be exploited to overcome the current deficiencies such as support for generality, context and distribution. This taxonomy is the result of our own experience in designing MOUSE, an object-oriented UIMS based on a general model, PAC, that can be applied at any level of abstraction of a user interface. PAC structures any component of an interactive application into three parts: the Presentation which defines the external behaviour, the Abstraction which corresponds to internal concepts and the Control which bridges the gap between the syntax and the semantics.