A Making-Movies Metaphor for Structuring Software Components in Highly Interactive Applications

Structuring full scale, highly interactive applications still involve complex design choices for programmers. This is because current techniques do not cover the issue of structuring applications at all scales. Programmers thus have to make choices without a good understanding of their consequences. We consider that this is similar to the problem encountered by a user who explores a user-driven application and has little guidance on actions that can be performed. In the same way as metaphors have been used to help users anticipate the consequences of their actions, we propose to use metaphors to help programmers make their choices. This article describes a making-movies metaphor that provides guidance for organising the interface of an application, but also its links with the objects of the functional core. We show how this approach can be merged with current software engineering techniques to specify and build full scale applications. This is exemplified with a graphical editor acting as an interface to optimisation algorithms, and used for splitting air space into air traffic control sectors.