Behaviour sharing in adaptable user interfaces

The practical contribution of this research is to remove the UI behavioural conflicts existing in a compound software environment. From the user point of view, editing text in a spreadsheet cell should not be any different from editing text in a text editor or any other integrated software package. However this is not always the case since different UI applications may inherit different UI techniques and behaviours. In this paper, an extended object-oriented model and Documentary Petri Net (DPN) are used to model an 'adaptable user interface' system. In doing so, rule-bases can be added to the DPN model allowing automatic reasoning about the user interface behaviours. Furthermore, formal properties of UI behaviours such as 'liveness' and 'boundedness' can be analyzed by using algorithms based on the formal properties of Petri Nets.