Automatic generation of interfaces using constraints
Raimund K. Ege · 1987
Interfaces play a crucial role in today's computer technology and much effort is spent to design and program user interfaces. This dissertation reports a new approach to this area of research that is based on the concept of separating the presentation from the data, and describing their relationship declaratively via filters. A filter is a package of constraints and associated typed objects that expresses that relationship of data and representation objects. This dissertation introduces the basic concepts of object, constraint and filter, and shows how they can be used to describe an interface. The syntax and semantics of the object and filter type definition is given and related to the theory. Object and filter types are implemented in an object-oriented language with the aid of a constraint-satisfaction system. A graphical tool for constructing filters is provided to build and test interfaces interactively.