Towards a general purpose architecture for UI generation

Many software projects spend a significant proportion of their time developing the User Interface (UI), therefore any degree of automation in this area has clear benefits. Such automation is difficult due principally to the diversity of architectures, platforms and development environments. Attempts to automate UI generation to date have contained restrictions which did not accommodate this diversity, leading to a lack of wide industry adoption or standardisation. The authors set out to understand and address these restrictions. We studied the issues of UI generation (especially duplication) in practice, using action research cycles guided by interviews, adoption studies and close collaboration with industry practitioners. In addressing the issues raised in our investigation, we identified five key characteristics any UI generation technique would need before it should expect wide adoption or standardisation. These can be summarised as: inspecting existing, heterogeneous back-end arch...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: JSS
• Authors: Richard Kennard, John Leaney
• Keywords: Adoption Studies, JSS 2010, UI Generation, User Interface