The Teallach Project: Improving UI Building with Object-Oriented Databases

Phil Gray, Rich Cooper Joanna Mckirdy

Abstract:

Object-oriented databases offer a major increase in functionality over previous types of database in terms of data modelling and access. Unfortunately, current versions come without reasonable user interface facilities, either for handling generic data or for interacting with specialised, domain-dependent applications. At the same time there has been little consideration of how the use of object-oriented modelling might be exploited in the design of user interface design environments. The only current proposed UIDE which specifies an object-oriented application model is Mastermind, which nevertheless suffers from several important shortcomings.

The Teallach Project, comprising investigators and RAs at Glasgow, Manchester and Napier Universities, has as its aim the development of a system which supports the construction of user interfaces to object-oriented databases. The goal is that the system will:

be generic - interfaces will be constructable for any data and operations which can be modelled in the database,
handle a wide of range of interaction and presentation styles, and
reduce construction costs-- that is, new interfaces and interface components will be constructable from existing ones with as little special programming knowledge and customised coding as possible.

It is our hypothesis that the use of an object-oriented system model and an object-oriented database will help in achieving all three of these goals.

In this talk we will give the motivation and background for the project, report on project achievements at the end of 4 months and discuss plans / ideas for the future. We promise to explain the project's title, too.