PENGUIN-a Programmable, Extensible, Network Graphical User INterface

This paper presents a software module currently being used in AT&T for developing graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to telephony applications. We use the name PENGUIN, a Programmable, Extensible Network Graphical User INterface to refer to this reusable software module, which has been realized as both an X Window Intrinsics (Xt) widget and a UNIX* process. PENGUIN offers advantages of shorter development time, lower development cost and better quality over traditional GUI development methods for this class of problems. PENGUIN achieves this by encapsulating the (extensive) domain independent work involved with such GUIs, while being extensible to allow the application to integrate the domain dependent features it needs. PENGUIN has been used in a number of telephony applications including network maintenance, restoration, and provisioning. It has, in some instances, reduced the development time of domain dependent features from one person-year to well less than one person-month.<>