Abstract
Traditional User Interface Management Systems (UIMSs) and User Interface (UI) toolkits provide support for the presentational aspects of the user interface but only a limited support for application semantics. These technologies have had only a limited success in reducing the programming effort of the user interface developer. Some recent efforts to solve this problem have addressed specific application domains. We provide a novel metaframework called MIG (Meta Interface Generator) which can be used to develop application domain-specific user interface management systems. MIG views the user interface as a set of communicating UI objects which represent the nodes of a UI graph with the edges representing their interrelationships. MIG derives its power and flexibility from the use of attributed graph grammars to specify a domain-specific set of UI objects and structural constraints on the UI graph. The MIG architecture also facilitates the integration of constraint satisfaction systems with the graph grammars which provides declarative features while preserving ease-of-use. MIG provides a visual, rapid prototyping environment for the UI developer. We implemented a prototype based on the MIG framework to demonstrate its capabilities.
Peram, Suresh Babu (1994). MIG : a metaframework for developing User Interface Management Systems. Texas A&M University. Texas A&M University. Libraries. Available electronically from
https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /DISSERTATIONS -1554893.