User Interface Management through a Composable Interactor Framework

Development of software systems is one of the largest and most important sectors of the U.S. economy and one where the U.S. retains a substantial competitive advantage. Application interface work constitutes a large fraction of the $ billions spent annually by government agencies, contractors and private developers. Graphical interface builders aim to reduce this effort substantially while improving the quality of the resulting interfaces. They should support large systems built using multiple languages and running concurrently on heterogeneous networks. Inter- face prototypes should lead smoothly into fully functional, customizable applications. Builders must provide suitable abstractions for window systems, application interfaces and event handling in order to provide the requisite portability and flexibility. No system to date has attempted this kind of flexibility in the complex environments found for large software systems. Our approach is termed the Composable Interactor Framework (CIF) and is based on the dual notions of general, abstract interactor elements and a customizable and combinable object framework. CIFs combine the portability and abstraction of User Interface Management Systems with the application-customizable interface and element combinability of systems lacking strict separation of presentation and application.