A Visual Environment for Specifying the Lexical and Syntactic Components of a User Interface

• Main Authors: Chou ,Sheu-Roug, 周樹榮
• Other Authors: Hsia, Yen-Teh
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 1996
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/87882420107008371197

碩士 === 中原大學 === 資訊工程研究所 === 84 === In the early days, the user of a software relies on the use of texts for doing input and output. This makes computers somewhat unfriendly. When window systems become common place, computers become much more user friendly. However, softwares that run on top of window systems are known to be very hard to construct. To help with the development of such softwares, toolkits like Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Borland Delphi emerge. These toolkits have a common problem: they emphasize rapid and easylayout of the interface. But they do not support a good program structure. In this thesis, we introduce an interface programming methodology, and we also introduce a visual environment called CY2 that supports this methodology. A program that we write using CY2 has two parts: the interface part and the application part. The interface part consists of three layers: the system component layer, the lexical layer, and the syntactic layer. The CY2 interface builder provides a nice environment for constructing the latter two layers, while the first layer is directly supported by the underlying system called Dt (for Drawing Toolkit). Besides packaging events into tokens that are recognizable by the lexical layer and the syntactic layer, CY2 also supports the notion of constraints. The programmer just specifies what constraints are there for the system to maintain. All these specifications, including the layout of the interface, are done in a very visual way.