Software Technology for Adaptable, Reliable Systems (STARS). User Interface Management Systems.
Abstract
This report examines three user interface management systems (UIMS) for their suitability as a UIMS for the STARS SEE. The three UIMSs chosen for evaluation were Serpent, developed by Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Chiron-1, under development in the Arcadia project, and TeleUSE, a product marketed by TeleLogic (U.S. subsidiary is TeleSoft). Although there are many other UIMS products available or under development, time permitted only the evaluation of these three. The STARS program has supported work on an Ada interface to X Window System toolkits to provide standard, portable graphical user interfaces, and this might seem sufficient for STARS, but programming with toolkits does not solve all problems in developing good user interfaces. A good survey of user interface development problems can be found in Mye88. In this paper Myers argues that toolkit programming is complex and requires application programmers to be expert programmers. Large software projects should have both application and toolkit experts and a way of partitioning the tasks.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 31, 1990
- Accession Number
- ADB152499