Arcadia Papers: ABSTRACT
"Supporting Separations of Concerns and Concurrency in the Chiron-1
User Interface System",
by Richard N. Taylor and Gregory F. Johnson in
Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Sytems,
pages 367-374, Amsterdam, April 1993. Association for Computing Machinery.
Abstract
The development of user interfaces for large applications is subject to a
series of well-known problems including cost, maintainability, and sensitivity
to changes in the operating environment. The Chiron user interface development
system has been built to address these software engineering concerns.
Chiron introduces a series of layers that insulate components of an application
from other components that may experience change. To separate application code
from user interface code, user interface agents called artists are
attached to application abstract data types. Operations on
abstract data types within the application implicitly trigger user interface
activities.
Chiron also provides insulation between the user interface layer and the
underlying system; artist code is written in terms of abstract depiction
libraries that insulate the code from the specifics of particular windowing
systems and toolkits.
Concurrency is pervasive in the Chiron architecture.
Inside an application there can
be multiple execution threads; there is no requirement for a user interface
listening/dispatching routine to have exclusive control.
Multiple artists can be attached to a
single application abstract data type, providing alternative forms of access by
a single user or coordinated access and manipulation by multiple users.
The Arcadia Project
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Last modified: Fri Nov 11 14:44:27 1994