| Summary: | 碩士 === 中原大學 === 資訊工程研究所 === 83 === How can we make a good user interface development
environment? If we take a look at some of today's popular
packages such as Visual Basic or Visual C++, we can see that
these packages are popular because they are easy to
understand, easy to learn, and easy to use. Take the use of
Visual Basic for example. The designer of the interface
only needs to know what the intended interface looks like.
To use Visual Basic to construct this interface is much like
using a drawing editor to construct a picture. This is what
makes Visual Baisc easy to learn and use. In this thesis, we
introduce a system that extends the idea of Visual Basic.
Specifically, we stick to the Visual Basic idea of constructing
an interface, and we add the idea of dialog control to the
interface builder. A UIMS (User Interface Management System)
should at least have two components. One is an interface
builder. The other is a dialog specification environment.
Visual Basic provides the first component (the interface
builder). But for the second component (dialog specification),
it only provides a text editor for writing callback
functions. In other words, a Visual Basic programmer must
embed dialog control in various callback functions. Since
dialog control is responsible for deciding what to do under
what circumstances, we may regard it as the "soul" of the
whole program. There are several drawbacks in the way a
Visual Basic programmer specifies dialog control. For one
thing, the programmer often has to consult the manual in order
to write the right code for changing the look of the
interface. But more importantly, the notion of dialog
control is only implicitly embedded in various pieces of
program codes. This can make it very difficult to verify the
correctness of the overall dialog control. Shouldn't the
system provide more functionality in this respect? The way our
system works is as follows. We use SUIT (Simple User Interface
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