Characterising Reusable User Interface Components for Teallach

Phil Gray & Richard Cooper

The Teallach Project is developing a model-based user interface development environment (MB-IDE) that provides designers with ways of characterising, constructing, editing and linking the domain, task and user interface models that can be composed to form an interactive system. We have now developed a first version of these models and a prototype environment for building and linking them. In this early version, user interface components are represented by their concrete form (viz., Java widgets). This limits their scope and reusability since there is no higher level characterisation of them than their Java class definitions.

We now seek to develop the user interface component into a more general and thorough way of describing Teallach user interface components in order to enable a designer to identify components in terms of design-significant features or combinations of features. We propose to use these characterisations in several contexts, including:

* constructing queries over a repository of pre-built Teallach UI components

* registering components into a repository which is heterogeneous in terms of how specialised the components are,

* creating or editing component characterisations, and

* specifying styles of user interface component.

In this talk, we shall report briefly on recent progress in the Teallach project, including the current state of the models and the prototype, and then introduce our revised user interface component model and discuss plans for its development.