The dialog tool set : a new way to create the dialog component

摘要

Toolkits are the most used environments in the Human Computer Interaction field. They permit to reuse, rather easily, interaction tools which are friendly to create every kinds of applications. The callback mechanism appears to be adequate for the control of applications when the tasks are autonomous and slightly structured. Inversely, when the tasks are recursively decomposed into sub-tasks, the dialog language becomes strongly structured and contextual, the callback mechanism is completely inadequate. Then, the dialog component code is spread in callbacks, and the application becomes hard to maintain. This paper presents a new kind of toolkit that permits the designer to explicitly create the dialog component. This toolkit, called the dialog toolset, is based on several classes that permit to define and to organize the system tasks in order to control their activation regarding to user inputs. The main characteristic of these tools is that they can be used exactly as the widgets. So, they keet the genericity and ease of use of the widget. The way to create the dialog component consists of creating diagets (diaget + gadget) (representation of the widgets in the dialog toolset) and to link them to the specific domain component functions using questionnaires (representation of the callbacks) and tokens (representation of the events). Then to create the dialog component, the designer retrieves the well known method consisting of linking objects to actions via callbacks regarding events. Moreover, the dialog toolset is perfectly adapted to the management of multi-modal application. The independence between the dialog component and the presentation component permits to adapt existing WIMP application to over modalities without modification of the dialog component.