a visual programming environment for device independent generation of user interfaces
The promise of information anytime, anywhere has become a reality. Today, it is possible to access information through multiple kinds of devices. However, the design of user interfaces for such devices is restricted to the use of specific adhoc programming languages that may vary from one device to the other. In this sense, the existence of generic programming languages for creating device-independent user interfaces is becoming a strong necessity. One emerging approach to device independent developments require the construction of generic vocabularies for transcoding into specific target codes for web browsers, PDAs, voice systems, mobile phones, etc. In this work, we present an authoring tool for designing generic user interfaces with automatic transcoding to multiple target languages. The tool is a visual programming environment with drag and drop generic widgets created in UIML and transcoded into VoiceXML, J2ME, HTML and WML languages. This tool takes advantage of the UIML language and visual programming paradigms for providing flexibility, consistency and decrease in development time.
visual programming generic vocabulary uiml j2me wml xslt vxml