What You See is What You Store: Database-Driven Interfaces
Jens Thamm, Lutz Wegner · 1998
Any graphical user interface (GUI) requires large amounts of complex metadata for the layout of windows and menus, their style and behavior, their bindings, etc. Designing, debugging and maintaining this interfaces is a difficult task and objectorientation is of little help as it tends to overcrowd the code with these metadata. Following a similar idea by Goyal et al., who considered GUI programming a database research problem and gave solutions based on logical programming, we propose storing these metadata in a database which we connect to a scripting language, here Tcl. We explain the details first with a small example where the database acts as a front-end to Mathematica ® . Next we indicate schemes, tables and generic methods for automated GUI design. Finally, we discuss the ultimate step, namely managing the interface at run-time from the database. In concluding, we present arguments for our belief that this technique goes well past current GUI builders and has great potential for simplifying design and maintenance of any type of application interface. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.