Patent ID: 8589868

Claim:
A method of creating a terminal application for use in a target computer, the method comprising: accessing software components, from libraries, to be used in different terminal applications executed by different target computers having different configurations; retrieving type information from metadata in classes of said libraries, including interfaces, operations, properties, and events associated with each class within the software components to ascertain type-safe relationships that are possible for each class based upon the type information; graphically representing each class in a control area of a screen together with type-safe relationship information for that class, each of the classes include one of more properties listing the names of other classes that can be accessed by, or that can access, that particular class; providing an association area of the screen to allow a user to create on the association area an instance of a class graphically represented on the control area; allowing a user to establish a relationship between an instance from one class and an instance from a different class only when the relationship is consistent with the type-safe relationship information for both classes; creating a configuration file describing the created instance and the relationships between the created instances and tailored to the configuration of the target computer receiving the configuration file at the target computer; wherein the target computer performs the steps of: accessing the software components that may be used in the terminal application; interpreting the configuration file to ascertain instances referenced by that file and relationships between instances referenced by that file; and creating a run-time executable code of the terminal application, using the configuration file and the software components.