An Object-Oriented Architecture for User Interface Management in Distributed Applications

User interfaces for large distributed applications have to handle specific problems: the complexity of the application itself and the integration of online-data into the user interface. A main task of the user interface architecture is to provide powerful tools to design and augment the end-user system easily, hence giving the designer more time to focus on user requirements. Our experiences developing a user interface system for a process control room showed that a lot of time during the development process is wasted for the integration of online-data residing anywhere but not in the user interface itself. Furtheron external data may be kept by different kinds of programs, e.g. C-programs running a numerical process model or PROLOG-programs running a diagnosis system, both in parallel to the process and in parallel to the user interface. Facing these specific requirements, we developed a user interface architecture following two main goals: 1. integration of external information into high-level graphical objects and 2. the system should be open for any program running as a separate process using its own problem-oriented language. The architecture is based on two approaches: an asynchronous, distributed and language independent communication model and an object model describing the problem domain and the interface using object-oriented techniques. Other areas like rule-based programming are involved, too. With this paper, we will present the XAVIA user interface architecture, the (as far as we know) first user inteface architecture, which is consequently based on a distributed object model