Java implementations of user-interface frameworks

Interactive systems enhance the usability of the application, in the sense of providing a convenient access to their services, allowing the user to spend less time learning the application and to produce results quickly. The graphical user-interface is the vehicle for achieving this usability. Frameworks, or semi-finished generic architectures, have been successfully used in the development of graphical user-interfaces. Besides, multi-agent models describe the architecture of interactive systems. Moreover, this architecture must reflect the paradigm of the separation between the abstract or semantic aspects of the system and its presentation to the final user. The authors' main purpose is to discuss an experience in developing object-oriented graphical user-interfaces using a framework for interface agents. In particular, a framework expressing the behavior of the PAC (Presentation-Abstraction-Control) model is specified in a pseudoformal language, a small application, a simplified graphical editor is implemented in Java, according to the framework's specification. The benefits and drawbacks of using this framework are discussed and a comparison with the well known MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework is also established. The goals are to study the facility of implementing in Java the patterns of the framework and to experiment the ease of coding in Java, directly from the framework's specification.