Towards Smart User Interface Design

摘要

User interface development and maintenance presents a burden for many developers. UI development approaches often restate information already captured in the application model such as entity attributes, validation, security, etc. Changes in application model often require many subsequent changes to the UI. Such duplication creates additional maintenance requirements for synchronization (at a minimum) and often is a source for errors (i.e., when model and UI disagree). Adding to the difficulties of creation and maintenance, typical UI implementations often tangle multiple concerns together such as presentation, validation, layout, security, etc. In this paper, we provide an approach that reduces information duplication and untangles mixed concerns. The capability of runtime UI generation can render user-specific UI, reduce conditional evaluation, and integrate third party security frameworks. To evaluate our approach, we provide a case study that demonstrates reduction of maintenance efforts, separation of concerns and performance of runtime UI generation.