Partitioning the Process of Interaction: An Abstract View
Balachander Krishnamurthy · Purdue e-Pubs (Purdue University System) · 1987
We present an abstraction mechanism to identify the layers of interaction between the user and application programs in a workstation environment.OUf first goal is to reduce the task of the interface programmer and enable him to provide a uniform interface to a variety of application programs.We require the interface to be customizable as well.Secondly, we want to min irnize interaction related information in the application programs and reduce the task of the application programmer as well.The abstraction mechanism has two parts: one (package configuration file, or PCF) which consists of interaction information extracted from the application program, and the other (user configuration me, or UCF) which is used by the user to specify his style of interaction.The information extracted from the application programs is encoded into the PCF and a generic parser parses this information at session start time.Similarly" the information relating to the user's bindings from input events to the actual functions he wishes to invoke, his choice of styles of interaction with the various application programs, etc., are gathered in the UCF which is consulted both at startup time and during the course of the session as well.1