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 1. Separates presentation from functionality. 2. Interface changes don’t require recompilation. 3. Not tied into any particular vendors GUI ToolKit. 4. 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, we’re 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 ntro.html

14 Questions