Publications
Developing an Event-Driven Generator for User Interfaces in the Entero Software
The Entero Software Project emphasizes flexibility, integration and scalability in modeling complex engineering systems. The GUIGenerator project supports the Entero environment by providing a user-friendly graphical representation of systems, mutable at runtime. The first phase requires formal language specification describing the syntax and semantics of extensible Markup Language (XML) elements to he utilized, depicted through an XML schema. Given a system, front end user interaction with stored system data occurs through Java Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), where often only subsets of system data require user input. The second phase demands interpreting well-formed XML documents into predefined graphical components, including the addition of fixed components not represented in systems such as buttons. The conversion process utilizes the critical features of JDOM, a Java based XML parser, and Core Java Reflection, an advanced Java feature that generates objects at runtime using XML input data. Finally, a searching mechanism provides the capability of referencing specific system components through a combination of established search engine techniques and regular expressions, useful for altering visual properties of output. The GUIGenerator will be used to create user interfaces for the Entero environment's code coupling in support of the ASCI Hostile Environments Level 2 milestones in 2003.