Abstract
Any graphical user interface (GUI) requires large amounts of complex metadata for the layout of windows and menus, their style and behavior, their bindings, etc. Designing, debugging and maintaining this interfaces is a difficult task and objectorientation is of little help as it tends to overcrowd the code with these metadata. Following a similar idea by Goyal et al., who considered GUI programming a database research problem and gave solutions based on logical programming, we propose storing these metadata in a database which we connect to a scripting language, here Tcl. We explain the details first with a small example where the database acts as a front-end to Mathematica®. Next we indicate schemes, tables and generic methods for automated GUI design. Finally, we discuss the ultimate step, namely managing the interface at run-time from the database. In concluding, we present arguments for our belief that this technique goes well past current GUI builders and has great potential for simplifying design and maintenance of any type of application interface.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
- Graphical User Interface
- Database Interface
- Widget Tree
- Graphical User Interface Program
- Interaction Finger
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Brain, M. (1992) Motif Programming - The Essentials… and More. Digital Press, Burlington, MA.
Buchmann, A.P. (1994) Active Object Systems. in: Advances in Object-Oriented Database Systems (eds. A. Dogac, M. Özsu, A. Biliris, T. Sellis) Nato ASI Series F: Computer and System Sciences, Vol. 130, Berlin, Springer, 201–224.
Date C. and Darwen, H. (1993) A Guide to the SQL Standard. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA. 3rd edition.
Dayal, S., Buchmann, A.P., and McCarthy, D.R. (1988) Rules are Objects too: A Knowledge Model for an Active, Object-Oriented Database System. Proc. Adv. in OODBS, Bad Munster, 129–143.
Goyal, N., Hoch, C., Krishnamurthy, R., Meckler, B., and Stone, M. (1996) Is GUI Programming a Database Research Problem ? Proc. 1996 ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf., Montreal, Canada, June 4–6, 1996, SIGMOD Record 25: 2, 517–528.
Lewis, T. (1996) The Next 10,0002 Years: Part II. IEEE Computer, 29: 5, 78–86.
Ousterhout, J.K. (1994) Tcl and the Tk Toolkit. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.
Rowe, L.R. and Stonebraker, M.R. (1987) The POSTGRES Data Model. - Proceed-ings of the 13th International Conference VLDB, 83–96.
Rusinkiewicz, M., Klas, W, Tesch, T., Wäsch, J., and Muth, P. (1995) Towards a Cooperative Transaction Model–The Cooperative Activity Model. Proc. 21. VLDB, Zurich, Switzerland, 194–205
Stallmann, F.W. (1997) “Mathematica by example”. Comput. Reviews 38: 9, 428–9.
Subieta, K.,Beeri, C., Matthes, F., and Schmidt, J.W. (1994) A Stack-Based Approach to Query Languages. in Proc. 2nd Int. East/West Database Workshop (eds. J.Eder and L.A.Kalinichenko), Klagenfurt, Austria, 25–28 Sept. 1994, Springer, London, 159–180.
Sun Microsystems (1995) The Java Language Specification, Vers. 1.0 Beta.
Thamm, J., Thelemann, S., and Wegner, L. (1996) Visual Information Systems–A Database Perspective. Proc. DMS ‘86 Third Pacific Workshop on Distributed Multimedia Systems, HKUST, June 25–28, 1996, eds. David Du and Olivia R. Liu Sheng, Knowledge Systems Institute, Skokie, IL, 274–285.
VAG (1996) VRML Architecture Group: The Virtual Reality Modeling Language Specification - Version 2.0. http://vag.vrml.orh/VRML2.0/FINAL/.
Venkatrao, M. and Pizzo, M. (1995) SQL/CLI–A New Binding Style For SQL. SIGMOD Record 24:4 (Dec.) 71–77.
Wegner, L.M. (1989) ESCHER–Interactive, Visual Handling of Complex Objects in the Extended NF2 Data Model. Proc. IFIP Work. Conference on Visual Database Systems, Tokyo (April 1989) 277–297
Wegner, L., Thelemann, S., Wilke, S., and Lievaart, R. (1996a) QBE-like Queries and Multimedia Extensions in a Nested Relational DBMS. Proc. Int. Conf. on Visual Information Systems (ed. C. Leung) Melbourne, Australia, 5–6 February 1996, 437–446.
Wegner, L., Paul, M., Thamm, J., and Thelemann, S. (1996b) A Visual Interface for Synchronous Collaboration and Negotiated Transactions. Proc. Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI’96), Gubbio, Italy, May 27–29, 1996 (eds. T.Catarci, M.F.Costabile, S.Levialdi, G.Santucci) ACM Press, 156–165.
Wilke, D., Wegner, L., and Thamm, J. (1997) Database-driven GUI Programming. Proc. 2. Int. Conf. on Visual Information Systems (Visual’97), San Diego CA (15–17 Dec.) 205–214.
Wolfram, S. (1993) Mathematica - A System for Doing Mathematics by Computer. 2nd ed., Addison-Wesley.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Thamm, J., Wegner, L. (1998). What You See is What You Store: Database-Driven Interfaces. In: Ioannidis, Y., Klas, W. (eds) Visual Database Systems 4 (VDB4). VDB 1998. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35372-2_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35372-2_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4757-6939-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-35372-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive