Automatic generation of graphical user interfaces for interactive database applications

This paper presents a system that allows the automatic generation of graphical user interfaces (GUI) for interactive database applications. The system is intended for novice application developers with limited experience in the design and implementation of graphical user interfaces, and with only a basic understanding of the conceptual database schema. The main components of the system are an automatic screen layout generator and a visual specification language in which end-user requirements are described through the direct manipulation of an Entity-Relationship diagram of the database. The visual language provides a series of operators that enable the systematic transformation of the schema diagram into a seeond type of graph, termed application specification diagram, that defines the entities and relationships of interest. An interpreter translates these diagrams into textual descriptions of the application that are used as input to the automatic screen layout generator. This mechanism performs the widget selection and placement tasks associated with the design of the GUI. It also generates the code needed to materialize it.