Compositional model-views with generic Graphical User Interfaces

Abstract

Creating GUI programs is hard even for prototyping purposes. Using the model-view paradigm makes it somewhat simpler since the model-view paradigm dictates that the model contains no GUI programming, as this is done by the views. Still, a lot of GUI programming is needed to implement the views. We present a new method for constructing GUI applications that fits well in the model-view paradigm. Novel in our approach is that the views also contain no actual GUI programming. Instead, views are constructed in a fully compositional way by defining a model of the view. We use a technique developed earlier to generate the GUI part. We show how the method supports flexibility, compositionality and incremental change by introducing abstract components in the view models.