Teallach - a flexible user - interface development environment for object database applications

The Teallach project has adapted model-based user-interface development techniques to the systematic creation of user-interfaces for object-oriented database applications. Model-based approaches aim to provide designers with a more principled approach to user-interface development using a variety of underlying models, and tools which manipulate these models. Here we present the results of the Teallach project, describing the tools developed and the flexible design method supported. Distinctive features of the Teallach system include provision of database-specific constructs, comprehensive facilities for relating the different models, and support for a flexible design method in which models can be constructed and related by designers in different orders and in different ways, to suit their particular design rationales. The system then creates the desired user-interface as an independent, fully functional Java application, with automatically generated help facilities.

Selecting the 'invisible' user interface development tool

Developers of interactive software are confronted by an increasing variety of software tools to help engineer the interactive aspects of software applications. Typically resorting to ad hoc means of tool selection, developers are often dissatisfied with their chosen tool on account of the fact that the tool lacks required functionality or does not fit seamlessly within the context in which it is to be used. This paper describes a system for evaluating the suitability of user interface development tools for use in software development organisations and projects such that the selected tool appears ‘invisible’ within its anticipated context of use. The paper also outlines and presents the results of an informal empirical study and a series of observational case studies of the system.