Derivation of a general purpose architecture for automatic user interface generation
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2011
Open Access
Copyright Clearance Process
- Recently Added
- In Progress
- Open Access
This item is open access.
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. Research
projects to date generally take one of three approaches: interactive graphical specification tools,
model-based generation tools, or language-based tools. The first two have proven popular in
industry but are labour intensive and error-prone. The third is more automated but has practical
problems which have led to a lack of industry adoption.
This thesis set out to understand and address these limitations. It studied the issues of UI
generation in practice using Action Research cycles guided by interviews, adoption studies, case
studies and close collaboration with industry practitioners. It further applied the emerging field
of software mining to address some of these issues. Software mining is used to collate multiple
inspections of an application's artefacts into a detailed model, which can then be used to drive
UI generation. Finally, this thesis explicitly defined bounds to the generation, such that it can
usefully automate some parts of the UI development process without restricting the
practitioner's freedom in other parts. It proposed UI generation as a way to augment manual UI
construction rather than replace it.
To verify the research, this thesis built an Open Source project using successive generations of
Iterative Development, and released and promoted it to organisations and practitioners. It
tracked and validated the project's reception and adoption within the community, with an
ultimate goal of mainstream industry acceptance. This goal was achieved on a number of levels,
including when the project was recognised by Red Hat, an industry leader in enterprise
middleware. Red Hat acknowledged the applicability and potential of the research within
industry and integrated it into their next generation products.
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: