Building Dynamic Interface Presentations by Example

Current and foreseeable trends in computer technology usage call for increasingly flexible and sophisticated interactive software, yet the development of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) remains a complex and costly process. The effort involved in interface construction is partially alleviated by the complementary use of graphical editors and other visual tools [4]. Visual builders save time, require very little knowledge from the developer, and help improve the quality of displays. However, the tools we know today are confined to the construction of the static portion of interface presentations and provide very little or no support for the dynamic aspects of displays, so that the dynamic behavior is programmed afterwards using toolkits or special-purpose libraries. The main reason for this is that the level of abstraction of the visual languages these tools provide is very low, which on the one hand favors their ease of use, but on the other makes it very hard to specify procedural information.