Graphical user interfaces are difficult to construct and, consequently, suffer from high development and maintenance costs. Automatic generation from declarative descriptions can reduce costs and enforce design principles. MASTERMIND is a model based approach to user interface generation. Designers model different aspects of an interface using declarative modeling languages, and tools synthesize these models into run-time code. The design process begins with user task and application modeling. These models are then refined into dialogue, presentation, and interaction models and an application API. These latter models drive the synthesis of run-time code. A design tool called Dukas is employed to support the refinement of task models into dialogue models
