Advanced Constraint Techniques for User Interface Implementation

这个项目探索了使用先进的基于约束的技术来生产高质量的用户界面。约束作为一种通用技术，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那些声明的关系，而无需显式编程。约束技术的使用极大地简化了用户界面实现的任务，从而使创建易于使用的计算机应用程序变得更加容易。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提供进展。使现有约束技术更加实用的工具将被生产出来并分发给用户界面社区。将探索约束在用户界面任务中的新应用，并开发约束的新的可视化符号。最后，该项目将开发用于约束满足的新并发算法，这将首次允许在跨网络分布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，因此将促进动态计算机应用程序的创建，这些应用程序明显更容易使用。

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.