Improving Usability of Interactive Graphics Specification and Implementation with Picking Views and Inverse Transformations

Specifying and programming graphical interactions are difficult tasks, notably because designers have difficulties to express the dynamics of the interaction. This paper shows how the MDPC architecture improves the usability of the specification and the implementation of graphical interaction. The architecture is based on the use of picking views and inverse transforms from the graphics to the data. With three examples of graphical interaction, we show how to express them with the architecture, how to implement them, and how this improves programming usability. Moreover, we show that it enables implementing graphical interaction without a scene graph. This kind of code prevents from errors due to cache consistency management

Verifying UML/OCL operation contracts

In current model-driven development approaches, software models are the primary artifacts of the development process. Therefore, assessment of their correctness is a key issue to ensure the quality of the final application. Research on model consistency has focused mostly on the models' static aspects. Instead, this paper addresses the verification of their dynamic aspects, expressed as a set of operations defined by means of pre/postcondition contracts. This paper presents an automatic method based on Constraint Programming to verify UML models extended with OCL constraints and operation contracts. In our approach, both static and dynamic aspects are translated into a Constraint Satisfaction Problem. Then, compliance of the operations with respect to several correctness properties such as operation executability or determinism are formally verified

Towards automation of user interface design

This paper suggests an approach to automatic software design in the domain of graphical user interfaces. There are still some drawbacks in existing user interface management systems (UIMS's) which basically offer only quantitative layout specifications via direct manipulation. Our approach suggests a convenient way to get a default graphical user interface which may be customized and redesigned easily in further prototyping cycles

Using Inhabitation in Bounded Combinatory Logic with Intersection Types for Composition Synthesis

We describe ongoing work on a framework for automatic composition synthesis from a repository of software components. This work is based on combinatory logic with intersection types. The idea is that components are modeled as typed combinators, and an algorithm for inhabitation {\textemdash} is there a combinatory term e with type tau relative to an environment Gamma? {\textemdash} can be used to synthesize compositions. Here, Gamma represents the repository in the form of typed combinators, tau specifies the synthesis goal, and e is the synthesized program. We illustrate our approach by examples, including an application to synthesis from GUI-components.Comment: In Proceedings ITRS 2012, arXiv:1307.784

GRAPHICAL CONFIGURATION PROGRAMMING - THE STRUCTURAL DESCRIPTION, CONSTRUCTION AND EVOLUTION OF SOFTWARE SYSTEMS USING GRAPHICS

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