A domain-specific language for structure manipulation in constraint system-based GUIs

A common frustration with programming Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) is that features for manipulating structures, such as lists and trees, are limited, inconsistent, buggy, or even missing. Implementing complete and convenient sets of operations for inserting, removing, and reordering elements in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of computer languages (Online) Vol. 74; p. 101175
Main Authors: Stokke, Knut Anders, Barash, Mikhail, Järvi, Jaakko
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.01.2023
Subjects:
Dataflow constraint systems
Declarative programming
GUI programming
Rule based systems
Separation of concerns
Separation of concerns
Rule based systems
GUI programming
Declarative programming
Dataflow constraint systems
ISSN:2590-1184, 2590-1184
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:A common frustration with programming Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) is that features for manipulating structures, such as lists and trees, are limited, inconsistent, buggy, or even missing. Implementing complete and convenient sets of operations for inserting, removing, and reordering elements in such structures can be tedious and difficult: a structure that appears as one collection to the user can be implemented as several different data structures and a web of dependencies between them. Structural modifications require changes both to the GUI’s model and view, and possibly extraneous bookkeeping operations, such as adding and removing event handlers. This paper introduces a DSL that helps programmers to implement a complete set of operations to structures displayed in GUIs. The programmer specifies structures and relations between elements in the structure. Concretely, the latter are definitions of methods for establishing and unestablishing relations. Operations that manipulate structures are specified as rules that control which relations should hold before and after a rule is applied. From these specifications, our tools generate an easy-to-use API for structure manipulation. We target constraint system-based Web GUIs: the DSL generates JavaScript and relies on dataflow constraint systems for expressing dependencies between elements in GUI structures. Our DSL gives tangible representations with well-defined operations for ad-hoc and incidental GUI structures.
ISSN:2590-1184
2590-1184
DOI:10.1016/j.cola.2022.101175