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From: klee@chico.pa.dec.com (Ken Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Reverse Engineering to a User Interface Devl Environment
Message-ID: <2213@bacchus.dec.com>
Date: 2 Dec 89 03:16:09 GMT
References: <639@ncis.tis.llnl.gov>
Sender: news@decwrl.dec.com
Reply-To: klee@decwrl.dec.com
Organization: DEC Western Software Laboratory
Lines: 27

In article <639@ncis.tis.llnl.gov>, carlson@lance.tis.llnl.gov (John
Carlson) writes:
> Is there a good paper which differentiates "User Interface Development
> Environment", "User Interface Builder", "User Interface Prototyper",
and "User
> Interface Management System"?

IMHO, these are terms used by sales people, not programmers.
Programmers use words like "layout tool" and "dialog management tool".
Some current products do both, though most only do layout.  A paper by
Olsen, et al, called "A Context for User Interface Management" (IEEE
CG&A, Cec., 1984) gives a good overview of these concepts.
 
> Now that we are all good toolkit programmers, toolkit
> programming is being replaced by user interface builders.  How
> can we easily take our existing applications and bring them into
> the user interface builder world? 

It's probably not too hard to write a tool that will read your C code
(or query your running widgets) and spit out some sort of high level
layout/resource specification language.  Reverse engineering dialog, on
the other hand, seems extremely difficult.

Ken Lee
DEC Western Software Laboratory, Palo Alto, Calif.
Internet: klee@decwrl.dec.com
uucp: uunet!decwrl!klee