SEPARATION OF USER INTERFACE AND APPLICATION WITH THE DELFT DIRECT MANIPULATION MANAGER (D2M2)

Abstract

In this paper a user interface management system is presented based on the same object-oriented approach to the design of both the user interface and the application semantics. However, data for user interface and application semantics are stored and processed apart. The outstanding feature of the system is that the modelling technique is identical for both, using the same tool for semantic data modelling. The modelling technique supports most characteristics of the object oriented paradigm: objects, classes and inheritance. The diagrams used can describe among others the concepts classification, aggregation, decomposition, generalization. Attributes of objects can be described in property forms. Transition diagrams are applied to specify the interaction possible to the end user. From these specifications a run time version of the whole application can be generated. A protocol is used for the communication between application and user interface manager during run time. Some features of Delft Direct Manipulation Manager are demonstrated with the design and implementation of a small application with direct manipulation.