Paul R. Calder

Composing user interfaces with InterViews

The authors describe a user interface toolkit, InterViews, that offers a rich set of composition mechanisms and a variety of predefined objects, allowing easy implementation of complex user interfaces. InterViews supports composition of three object categories, each implemented as a hierarchy of object classes derived from a common base class. The categories are interactive objects, structured graphics objects, and structured text objects. The authors present several simple applications and show how InterViews objects can implement their interfaces. They illustrate the benefits of separating interactive behavior and abstract data in several different contexts. They discuss InterViews support for end-user customization as well as the status of the current implementation.<<ETX>>

Glyphs: flyweight objects for user interfaces

Current user interface too&its provide components that are complex and expensive. Programmers cannot use these components for many kinds of application data because the resulting implementation would be awkward and inefficient. We have defined a set of small, simple components, called glyphs, that programmers can use in large numbers to build user interfaces. To show that glyphs are simple and efficient, we have implemented a WYSIWYG document editor. The editor’s performance is comparable to that of similar editors built with current tools, but its implementation is much simpler. We used the editor to create and print this paper.