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Visual reflection library: a framework for declarative GUI programming on the Java platform

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Computing and Visualization in Science

Abstract

The automated mapping of program functionality to intuitive user interfaces is a highly challenging task. Nevertheless it is a promising way to significantly improve software quality by simplifying the development process. This paper describes a method for a declarative and fully automated creation of graphical user interfaces from Java objects, i.e. the information accessible via the Java Reflection API. For this purpose we created the Visual Reflection Library (VRL). VRL interfaces are able to represent complex workflows and allow for a certain degree of visual programming. We start by describing an application: the development of an interactive user interface for the simulation system UG. By shortly discussing the requirements for such an interface, we will explain the reasons for creating VRL and the benefits we gained from it. After that we give an overview of our methods and show several applications. We end by summarizing our results and giving a future outlook.

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Notes

  1. Groovy is a dynamic language for the Java platform (see: [3]).

  2. This is not necessarily the shortest possible implementation.

  3. Annotations are meta-data that can be added to source code without affecting its functionality. See http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/guide/language/annotations.html for detailed explanations.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Alexander Heusel, Daniel Jungblut and Alfio Grillo for useful discussions during the preparation of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Goethe-Center for Scientific Computing (G-CSC), Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main, Kettenhofweg 139, 60325, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Michael Hoffer, Christian Poliwoda & Gabriel Wittum

Authors
  1. Michael Hoffer
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  2. Christian Poliwoda
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  3. Gabriel Wittum
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michael Hoffer.

Additional information

Communicated by: Randolph E. Bank.

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Hoffer, M., Poliwoda, C. & Wittum, G. Visual reflection library: a framework for declarative GUI programming on the Java platform. Comput. Visual Sci. 16, 181–192 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00791-014-0230-y

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