TAE Plus: Transportable Applications Environment Plus tools for building graphic-oriented applications

The Transportable Applications Environment Plus (TAE Plus), developed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, is a portable User Interface Management System (UIMS), which provides an intuitive WYSIWYG WorkBench for prototyping and designing an application's user interface, integrated with tools for efficiently implementing the designed user interface and effective management of the user interface during an application's active domain. During the development of TAE Plus, many design and implementation decisions were based on the state-of-the-art within graphics workstations, windowing system and object-oriented programming languages. Some of the problems and issues experienced during implementation are discussed. A description of the next development steps planned for TAE Plus is also given

Software engineering activities at SEI (Software Engineering Institute)

Prototyping was shown to ease system specification and implementation, especially in the area of user interfaces. Other prototyping approaches do not allow for the evolution of the prototype into a production system or support maintenance after the system is fielded. A set of goals is presented for a modern user interface environment and Serpent, a prototype implementation that achieves these goals, is described

User Interface Management Systems: A Survey and a Proposed Design

The growth of interactive computing has resulted in increasingly more complex styles of interaction between user and computer. To facilitate the creation of highly interactive systems, the concept of the User Interface Management System (UIMS) has been developed. Following the definition of the term 'UIMS' and a consideration of the putative advantages of the UIMS approach, a number of User Interface Management Systems are examined. This examination focuses in turn on the run-time execution system, the specification notation and the design environment, with a view to establishing the features which an "ideal" UIMS should possess. On the basis of this examination, a proposal for the design of a new UIMS is presented, and progress reported towards the implementation of a prototype based on this design

RICIS Software Engineering 90 Symposium: Aerospace Applications and Research Directions Proceedings

Papers presented at RICIS Software Engineering Symposium are compiled. The following subject areas are covered: synthesis - integrating product and process; Serpent - a user interface management system; prototyping distributed simulation networks; and software reuse

Designing graphical interface programming languages for the end user

This thesis sets out to answer three simple questions: What tools are available for novice programmers to program GUIs? Are those tools fulfilling their role? Can anything be done to make better tools? Despite being simple questions, the answers are not so easily constructed. In answering the first question, it was necessary to examine the range of tools available and decide upon criteria which could be used to identify tools aimed specifically at the novice programmer (there being no currently agreed criteria for their identification). Having identified these tools, it was then necessary to construct a framework within which they could be sensibly compared. The answering of the second question required an investigation of what were the successful features of current tools and which features were less successful. Success or failure of given features was determined by research in both programming language design and studies of programmer satisfaction. Having discovered what should be retained and discarded from current systems, the answering of the third question required the construction of new systems through blending elements from visual languages, program editors and fourth generation languages. These final prototypes illustrate a new way of thinking about and constructing the next generation of GUI programming languages for the novice

Sixth Annual Users' Conference

Conference papers and presentation outlines which address the use of the Transportable Applications Executive (TAE) and its various applications programs are compiled. Emphasis is given to the design of the user interface and image processing workstation in general. Alternate ports of TAE and TAE subsystems are also covered

OSU : a high speed software development environment

Several problems with user interface design and implementation have been identified: (1) user interfaces are difficult and time­-consuming to design and implement; (2) most user interface management systems (UIMS) are themselves difficult to use by a programmer; (3) UIMS's have not been integrated with other tools that support structured design, coding and maintenance, thus failing to maximize programmer productivity. In the Oregon Speedcode Universe (O.S.U.) project, we had taken the following approaches: (1) direct manipulation programming technique is used to address the problems with user interface design and implementation; (2) integration of UIMS with CASE tools; and (3) high-level program generation from scripts, and reusable components. This report surveys some of the existing UIMS's and describes O.S.U., a high-speed software development system. The main emphasis of this work is the design and implementation of Structure Chart Editor in O.S.U.. The Structure Chart Editor has three unique features: 1) combination of functional decomposition with object-oriented design, 2) alternate architectural views, e.g. call graph, uses graph, object graph, and graphical display of procedures, 3) merging the user interface specification with design and coding specifications. Experimental results suggest that the techniques employed by OSU can be used to develop 50-90% of an application without explicit programming yielding 2-10 fold productivity improvements