An approach to automatic construction of graphical user interfaces for applications in scientific computing
Vadim Engelson · 1996
Applications in scientific computing perform input and output of large amounts of data of complex structure. Since it is difficult to interpret these data in textual form, a graphical user interface (GUI) for data editing, browsing and visualization is required. The availability of a convenient graphical user interface plays a critical role in the use of scientific computation systems. Most approaches to generating user interfaces provide some interactive layout facility together with a specialized language for describing user interaction. Realistic automated generation approaches are largely lacking, especially for applications in the area of scientific computing. This thesis presents two approaches to automatically generating user interfaces from specifications. The first is a semi-automatic approach, that uses information from object-oriented mathematical models, together with a set of predefined elementary types and manually supplied layout and grouping information. This system is ...