uims

This paper presents a demonstrational interface builder with improved reasoning capabilities. The system is comprised of two major components: an interactive display manager and a rule-based reasoner. The display manager provides facilities to draw the physical appearance of an interface and define interface behavior by graphical demonstration. The behavior is defined using a technique of stimulus-response demonstrations. With this technique, an interface developer first demonstrates a stimulus that represents an action that an end user will perform on the interface. After the stimulus, the developer demonstrates the response(s) that should result from the given stimulus. As the behavior is demonstrated, the reasoner observes the demonstrations and draws inferences to expedite behavior definition. The inferences entail generalizing from specific behavior demonstrations and identifying constraints that define the generalized behavior. Once behavior constraints are identified, the reasoner sends them to the display manager to complete the definition process. When the interface is executed by an end-user, the display manager uses the constraints to implement the run-time behavior of the interface.

This paper describes Visual Obliq, a user interface development environment for constructing distributed, multi-user applications. Applications are created by designing the interface with a GUI-builder and embedding callback code in an interpreted language, in much the same way as one would build a traditional (non-distributed, single-user) application with a modern user interface development environment. The resulting application can be run from within the GUI-builder for rapid turnaround or as a stand-alone executable. The Visual Obliq runtime provides abstractions and support for issues specific to distributed computing, such as replication, sharing, communication, and session management. We believe that the abstractions provided, the simplicity of the programming model, the rapid turnaround time, and the applicability to heterogeneous environments, make Visual Obliq a viable tool for authoring distributed applications and groupware.