Description

1
Description Generation of GUI

• SE690 SE696 Project
• Initial Presentation
• Paul D. Johnson Jinesh Parekh
• Supervised by Dr. Xiaoping Jia

2
Contents

• Introduction
• Problem Statement
• Proposal
• Benefits
• Design
• References
• Questions

3
Introduction

• Design a cross platform solution efficiently with
  minimum effort.
• Traditional GUI Toolkit Solution
• Swing, MFC, Unix curses, etc
• XML Based Solution
• XUL (Mozilla), XForms (W3C), etc

4
XML Based Advantages

• Separates presentation from functionality.
• Interface changes dont require recompilation.
• Not tied into any particular vendors GUI ToolKit.
• Develop User Interfaces easy as developing web
  sites.

5
Problem Statement

• XML based interface provide a mechanism to easily
  define a GUI but it requires creating a different
  markup for every device individually and
  manually. Thus even though the functionality and
  the information that is displayed remains the
  same, were required to develop one GUI
  definition for each device. Obviously this is
  redundant and time- consuming.

6
Proposal

• Develop a rule-based system which will
  automatically transform the GUI definition to
  suit the requirements of the new device.

7
Design

• Develop a GUI Markup Language using XML based on
  XUL.
• Develop a Rule Based System.
• Develop a Code Generator to produce the actual
  GUI for a particular platform or device.

8
Benefits

• Easy to modify Graphical User Interface
• Applications will be portable between platforms
• Application will require less bandwidth over
  Internet
• Rules will govern changes not Interface

9
GUI Markup Language

• Build upon XUL (XML User Interface Language)
  concepts and tags.

10
XUL (XML User Interface Language)

• Mozilla based XML User Interface Language.

11
Project Plan

• Phase 1 Initial Presentation
• Milestone 1 Proposal for project approval
• Phase 2 Development GUI Markup Language
  (May/June)
• Milestone 1  Develop a Graphical User Interface
  Markup Language.
• Milestone 2  Build sample GUI application as
  prototype.
• Phase 3 Develop Framework for Rule Based System
  (July)
• Milestone 1  Develop a framework to support
  rules for system
• specification.
• Milestone 2  Build sample applications.

12
Project Plan (Cont)

• Phase 4 Develop Code Generator
• Milestone 1 Swing
• Milestone 2 SWT
• Phase 5 Analysis (Summer/Fall)
• Milestone 1  Analysis
• Milestone 2  Final Presentation/Demo.
• Milestone 3 Complete research paper, Fall 2003
• Final Presentation, Fall 2003
• Completion Fall 2003

13
References

1. Vaughn Bullard, Smith, Daconta. Essential XUL
   Programming. New York John Wiley Sons, Inc.
   2001.
2. http//www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/xultu/intro.htm
   l

14
Questions