An approach to automatic construction of graphical user interfaces for applications in scientific computing

Sammanfattning:

Applications in scientific computing perform input and output of large amounts of data of complex structure. Since it is difficult to interpret these data in textual form, a graphical user interface (GUI) for data editing, browsing and visualization is required. The availability of a convenient graphical user interface plays a critical role in the use of scientific computation systems.Most approaches to generating user interfaces provide some interactive layout facility together with a specialized language for describing user interaction. Realistic automated generation approaches are largely lacking, especially for applications in the area of scientific computing.This thesis presents two approaches to automatically generating user interfaces from specifications. The first is a semi-automatic approach, that uses information from object-oriented mathematical models, together with a set of predefined elementary types and manually supplied layout and grouping information. This system is currently in industrial use for generating user interfaces that include forms, pull-down menus and pop-up windows. The current primary application is bearing simulation, which typically accepts several thousand input parameters and produces gigabytes of output data. A serious disadvantage is that some manual changes need to be made after each update of the high-level model.The second approach avoids most of the limitations of the first generation graphical user interface generating system. We have designed a tool, PDGen (Persistence and Display Generator) that automatically creates a graphical user interface from the declarations of data structures used in the application (e.g., C++ class declarations). This largely eliminates the manual update problem. Structuring and grouping information is automatically extracted from the inheritance and part-of relations in the object-oriented model and transferred to PDGen which creates the user interface. The attributes of the generated graphical user interface can be altered in various ways if necessary.This is one of very few existing practical systems for automatically generating user interfaces from type declarations and related object-oriented structure information.