Developing Principles of GUI Programming Using Views

This paper proposes that GUI development is as important as other aspects of programming, such as a sound understanding of control structures and object orientation. Far less attention has been paid to the programming structures for GUIs and certainly there are few cross language principles to aid the programmer. We propose that principles of GUIs can be extracted and learnt, and that they do enhance good programming practice. These principles have been implemented in our Views system which features an XML-based GUI description notation coupled with an engine that shields the programmer from much of the intricate complexity associated with events, listeners and handlers. The system is programmed primarily in C # for.NET, but is available in various forms for Java and for other platforms which support.NET through the SSCLI