Engineering graphic user interfaces with protected content

Abstract

Information technology organizations are increasingly having difficulty completing software projects with protected content due to a lack of qualified engineers with proper security credentials. These organizations are turning toward technology to look for advanced software tools that allow them to develop software systems while protecting proprietary or classified content. Many of these software systems require that a graphic user interface (GUI) be developed without accessing protected content. Properly credentialed engineers can later embed the protected content in this GUI. This paper presents a software tool, called GUI Miner, which allows users to edit the contents of GUIs without accessing the source code of the target application. This tool extracts the entire set of GUI widgets in an existing Java application to make them available for editing. Edit changes made on these widgets are automatically reflected on the screen and saved to appropriate class files by modifying their bytecode. Testing of this tool on a set of small Java applications shows that it works as expected without consuming too many memory or processor resources.