Automatic Generation of Interactive Applications

As user interfaces become more powerful and easier to use, they are often harder to design and implement. This has created a great demand for tools which help programmers create interactive applications. While existing interface tools simplify interface creation, they typically focus only on the interface, do not provide facilities for simplifying application generation, and are too low-level. We have developed a tool which automatically generates complete interactive applications from a high-level description of the application's semantics. We argue that our system provides a very simple yet powerful environment for application development. Key advantages include: ease of use, separation of interface and application, interface and machine independence, more comprehensive programming aids, and greater potential for software reusability. While we tend to focus on the practical motivations for using such a tool, we conclude that this approach should form the basis of an important category of interface tools and deserves further study.