A Customizing Environment for User Interfaces based on Application Semantics

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Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) have been widely accepted, and various software tools to support GUI programming called GUI builders have been developed. The GUI builders are designed based on GUI widgets which are designed objects used as universal GUI components. The GUI builders are quite successful to build GUIs from GUI elements but are not suitable to modify existing GUIs in accordance with user's requirements, i.e., customization.In this research, we have defined a new programming model for GUI development. The model has two aspects, which are definition of GUI components based on application semantics and two phase programming process. A GUI component, which is called a User Interface Object (UIO), is defined in two aspects, which are the abstract description that gives functional definition of the UIO and the concrete description that gives physical structure of the UIO.Since the functional definition, i.e., application semantics, is given separately from the physical structure, we can define a set of UIOs which has the same abstract description and differs in their concrete description. The two phase programming process consists of the functional design phase (FDP) and the visual design phase (VDP) to define and verify functional definition of a UIO (i.e., abstract description) and to define and/or modify look-and-feel of a UIO (i.e., a concrete description), respectively. We have developed a GUI development tool based on this programming model. The tool consists of three components, which are the function builder for FDP,visual the design builder for VDP and the UIO-base to store and manage UIOs.