Automating UI Generation by Model Composition

Automated user-interface generation environments have been criticized for their failure to deliver rich and powerful interactive applications[24]. To specify more powerful systems, designers need multiple specialized modeling notations[17, 19]. The model composition problem is concerned with automatically deriving powerful, correct, and efficient user interfaces from multiple models specified in different notations. Solutions balance the advantages of separating code generation into specialized code generators with deep, model-specific knowledge against the correctness and efficiency obstacles that result from such separation. We present a solution that maximizes the advantage of separating code generation. In our approach, highly specialized, model-specific code generators synthesize run-time modules from individual models. We address the correctness and efficiency obstacles by formalizing composition mechanisms that code generators may assume and that are guaranteed by a run-time inf..