iTask as a new paradigm for building GUI applications

Abstract

The iTask system is a combinator library written in Clean offering a declarative, domain-specific language for defining workflows. From a declarative specification, a complete multi-user, web-enabled, workflow management system (WFMS) is generated. In the iTask paradigm, a workflow is a definition in which interactive elements are defined by editors on model values (abstracting from concrete GUI implementation details). The order of their appearance is calculated dynamically using combinator functions (abstracting from concrete synchronisation details). Defining interactive elements and the order of their appearance are also major concerns when programming GUI applications. For this reason, the iTask paradigm is potentially suited to program GUI applications as well. However, the iTask system was designed for a different application domain and lacks a number of key features to make it suited for programming GUI applications. In this paper, we identify these key features and show how they can be added to the iTask system in an orthogonal way, thus creating a new paradigm for programming GUI applications. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.