Advanced Constraint Techniques for User Interface Implementation

这个项目探索使用先进的基于约束的技术来生产高质量的用户界面。作为一种通用技术，约束允许声明实体之间要保持的一组关系。然后使用约束满足系统来自动维护这些声明的关系，而无需显式编程。约束技术的使用提供了极大地简化用户界面实现的任务，并因此使得创建易于使用的计算机应用程序基本上更容易。该项目将采用基于传播的约束技术，并寻求在几个相关领域取得进展。将制作使现有约束技术更加实用的工具，并将其分发给用户界面社区。将探索约束对用户界面任务的新应用，并将开发新的约束的可视化表示法。最后，这个项目将开发新的并发约束满足算法，这将第一次允许在分布在网络上的多用户界面中有效地使用约束。总而言之，这些进步将有助于使各种高质量的用户界面更容易构建，从而将促进更易于使用的动态计算机应用程序的创建。

This project explores the use of advanced constraint-based techniques for the production of high quality user interfaces. Constraints as a general technique allow the declaration of a set of relationships that are to hold between entities. Constraint satisfaction systems are then used to maintain those declared relationships automatically without explicit programming. The use of constraint techniques offers to dramatically simplify the task of user interface implementation and hence make the creation of easy to use computer applications substantially easier. This project will employ propagation-based constraint techniques and seek to provide advances in several related areas. Tools to make existing constraint techniques more practical will be produced and distributed to the user interface community. New applications of constraints to user interface tasks will be explored, and new visual notations for constraints will be developed. Finally, this project will develop new concurrent algorithms for constraint satisfaction which will, for the first time, allow constraints to be effectively employe d in multi-user interfaces distributed across networks. Taken together, these advances will serve to make a wide variety of high quality user interfaces easier to construct, and hence will promote creation of dynamic computer applications that are significantly easier to use.