xy-wins: an integraded environment for developing graphical user interfaces
XY-WINS is an integrated environment that supports design, prototyping, implementation, and debugging of graphical user interfaces. XY-WINS tools allow user interface designers to work at an abstract level, thus enabling non-experts in computer graphics to quickly prototype graphical interfaces. However, the tools also allow great flexibility in defining graphical features. XY-WINS supports the development of user interfaces consisting of two main modules: a Graphical Abstract Machine (GRAM), and a High-level Interaction Component (HIC). The GRAM encapsulates the lower levels of input and output, and provides the HIC with an abstract view of the user based on abstract representations of pictures and on input tokens incoming through input channels. The HIC implements the dialogue between this abstraction of the user and the back-end of the system. The environment provides tools for generating a GRAM from abstract specifications of the graphical constructs and the input tokens that are to be used in a user interface. These specifications can be edited interactively and graphically. The HIC can be specified as a system of independent communicating processes/objects by using a high-level concurrent language, which also includes control structures designed to support the definition of complex user/system interactions. Finally, an interactive debugging system allows one to execute the user interface, while simultaneously visualizing end-user screen, state of the GRAM, and state of the HIC.
integrability environments developer graphics graphical user interfaces user user interface interfaces support design prototype implementation debugging tools abstraction computer graphics flexibility feature module interaction input dialogue systems communication process object concurrency language control structure definition complexity visualization end-user