Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 8, numbers 1 and 2, 2015 // View article

Modeling Responsibilities of Graphical User Interface Architectures via Software Categories

Authors:
Stefan Wendler

Keywords: GUI software architecture; software architecture; user interface patterns; graphical user interface

Abstract:
Business information of our days systems heavily rely on graphical user interfaces (GUIs) as a sub-system that provides rich interaction options to access business services and stands out with high usability. To develop and maintain a GUI sub-system, high efforts accumulate due to missing standard solutions and limited reuse of already established architectures. Published architectural patterns and few reference architectures are primary sources for GUI architecture development. However, these concepts need to be extensively adapted, since individual requirements are to be met and available sources do not describe all necessary details. These are fine-grained GUI responsibilities, differentiated state handling for application and presentation as well as implementation structures. Therefore, GUI development projects create high efforts and their resulting architecture often does not represent the desired separation of concerns, and so, is hard to maintain. These architectures are no proper foundation for the integration of recent user interface pattern (UIP) concepts, which promise a reuse of proven usability concepts and enable the automated generation of vast GUI parts. In this work, the design issues that occur during GUI architecture development are to be analyzed. To prepare the analysis, selected GUI architecture and pattern concepts are presented. Furthermore, the general responsibilities of GUI sub-systems and their structural elements are identified. In detail, software categories are applied to model the GUI responsibilities and their relationships by separating their concerns based on several dimensions of knowledge. The resulting software category tree serves as a basis to review the well-known model view controller pattern and the Quasar client architecture, which is a detailed GUI reference architecture of the domain. As result, the major design issues of GUI systems are derived and summarized. Eventually, the created GUI software category tree can be applied as a foundation for the creation, understanding and assessment of other GUI patterns or reference architectures.

Pages: 182 to 213

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2015. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2015

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2628