Rollit: An Application Builder.
Solange Karsenty, Chris Weikart · 1994
Contemporary user interface development systems greatly simplify creation of traditional dialogue user interface made of buttons or menus, but they do not support the construction and manipulation of application-specific graphical objects. This article describes Rollit, a domain-specific, interactive, application builder developed at the DEC Paris Research Laboratory. The goal of this system is to automatically generate, as a result of direct manipulation, the domain-specific user interface and its run-time behavior as well as the traditional dialogue user interface. Application programmers construct complex objects from standard components, define the interactions between those objects and attach behaviors to them. A constraint-based inference system facilitates the definition of geometrical constraints between objects. Our run-time system kernel supports standard operations on those objects, such as creation and deletion, cut and paste, grouping, save and load. This article describes...