3. 3
Abstract
This work is concerned with interactive software design for multiple environments, taking into
account recent progress in the field of user interface software and technology. To this end, we take
advantage of the model-based UI engineering paradigm, rather than the prominent toolkit-based, since
the former provides native predilection towards addressing the diversity of requirements imposed by the
wide diversity of devices, users and contexts of use, which all need to be taken take into account when
designing for multiple environments.
In such settings of particular importance is the UI design which turns out to be a quite challenging task.
Prominent design tools are either biased towards facilitating a rather static context of use, or limited to
work as proof of concept tools thus most often supporting only an indicative subset of the interaction
facilities provided by the target UIDL specification they implement.
Our approach addresses this limitation aiming to provide a fully functional, professional-level and
integrated design environment (IDE) based on the NetBeans platform with full implementation of the
UsiXML language specification. The produced tool facilitates the design phase in that it relieves /
decouples designers from the burden of understanding unnecessary technical details, imposed by the
heterogeneities of target platforms, thus allowing them to exclusively focus on the UI design. A key
property of the tool is that it integrates custom software components that allow run-time translation of
the actions designers take during a UI design phase into a UsiXML specification reflecting each time
visually the designed outcome.
Keywords: UI design for multiple environments, Model-Based UI development, Model-based UI
engineering, UsiXML, NetBeansIDE, NetBeans platform, modules development.