Diplomarbeit

Platform independent description of modern user interface controls

Aufgabenstellung

With regard to the ongoing development of modern desktop user interfaces the number of concepts and ways for creating reliable user interface elements is still growing. While interface elements of current operating systems should behave equally, the effort regarding the development of platform independent user interfaces can grow enormously. One new approach is the descriptive declaration of UI-controls, as can be seen with XAML in the upcoming Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation. The Comarch OCEAN GenRap project, which is distributed to the .NET and Java platform, commonly available controls (e.g. from the swing library), should also match the high demands of complex applications. Therefore the implementation of custom-made controls became necessary, where the control logic is written in Java and used by both distribution ways. Thereby wrappers which abstract from the graphics system of each platform try to minimize the implementation effort. This project background forms the basis for this work, which will be done in the field of declarative languages for user interfaces and platform independent UI-logics connected to them. The following detailed results are expected from this thesis:

Comparison of novel declarative description languages and cross platform user interface approaches (e.g. UIML, XAML, Qt…) for desktops, heterogeneous end devices including various interaction devices. Further aspects are:
- Research concerning transformation approaches for the automatic generation of different platform independent implementation variants
- Analysis of abstract and task-oriented concepts for UI-controls (scalar value entering, state choice), which then can be mapped to specific UI-controls, depending on end devices or the input device's degrees of freedom
- Inclusion of description mechanisms for innovative post-WIMP-UI-controls (e.g. 3D-widgets, AR-UI-elements)
Analysis of the underlying logic for these declarative mechanisms and the connection between logic, UI-description and application code with a possible separation similar to the MVC-model.
Conception of design patterns for reusable UI-controls of the platform independent reporting tool OCEAN GenRap to keep the implementation effort down. An overview of the whole description and implementation process (languages, transformations, code creation) should precede this work.
Selection and prototypical implementation of suitable UI-elements for the OCEAN-project including test and evaluation of the proposed and chosen method.

Weitere Informationen

Autor(en):	Christian Bormann
Laufzeit:	01.05.2006 - 30.10.2006
Verantwortlicher HSL:	Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus Meißner
Betreuer:	Dr.-Ing. Raimund Dachselt
Institut, Lehrstuhl:	SMT, Multimediatechnik
Zugehörige Projekte:	INPERIC