A New Approach to Visual Programming in User Interface Design.
Jürgen Herczeg, Hubertus Hohl, Matthias Ressel · 1993
To face prevailing problems with existing tools for interactively building graphical user interfaces we present a new object-oriented approach to implementing visual programming tools. This approach is employed by the user interface development environment XIT. It is based on the representation of knowledge for creating and manipulating interaction objects in the underlying user interface toolkit. This knowledge forms the basis for a set of higher-level tools, including interface builders, inspectors, browsers, and tracers, which may be applied to user interfaces created by either visual or conventional programming. 1. THE ROLE OF VISUAL PROGRAMMING IN USER INTERFACE DESIGN Employing visual programming techniques for building graphical user interfaces is not quite new [5]. Only recently, however, with the availability of so-called interface builders it has attracted the attention of application programmers. With these tools, a graphical user interface may be constructed by means of di...