Département d'ingénierie informatique

Programming Languages and Systems

Dynamic graphical user interfaces

Project leader : Peter Van Roy

Collaborations :J. Vanderdonckt (School of Management, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium)

Framework : Mozart Consortium, especially : Description :

The goal is to make it easy to create dynamic graphical user interfaces within an application program. A dynamic interface is one that can change during execution.

We integrate user interface definition tightly with the programming language Oz so that it takes advantage of the language's abilities to concisely define and manipulate symbolic data structures.

We combine declarative and procedural approaches for specifying graphical user interfaces to get the best of both approaches: the manipulability of the declarative approach and the expressiveness of the procedural approach.

We have built a full-featured GUI tool, Qtk (http://www.mozart-oz.org/documentation/mozart-stdlib/wp/qtk/html/) (figure \ref{figFlexClock}), that is part of the Mozart Programming System.




The abilities of QTk are illustrated by FlexClock
(http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/people/ned/flexclock/index.html), a simple clock utility.


Publications :

  1. Donatien Grolaux, QTk -- Graphical User Interface Design for Oz, Standard Library, Mozart Programming System.
  2. Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi, Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, chapter 10, MIT Press, 2004.
  3. Donatien Grolaux, Peter Van Roy, and Jean Vanderdonckt, FlexClock: A Plastic Clock Written in Oz with the QTk Toolkit, Proceedings of 1st International Workshop on Task Models and Diagrams for User Interface Design (TAMODIA 2002), Bucharest, Romania, July 2002.
  4. Raphaël Collet, The Oz Minesweeper: Using a Digital Assistant to Aid Play, application program, 2001.
  5. Donatien Grolaux, Peter Van Roy, and Jean Vanderdonckt, QTk -- An Integrated Model-Based Approach to Designing Executable User Interfaces, Proceedings of 8th Workshop on Design, Specification, and Verification of Interactive Systems (DSVIS 2001), Glasgow, Scotland, June 2001.
  6. Donatien Grolaux, Peter Van Roy, and Jean Vanderdonckt, QTk -- A Mixed Declarative/Procedural Approach for Designing Executable User Interfaces, 8th IFIP Working Conference on Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction (EHCI '01), May 2001.