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Accession Number:
ADA187499
Title:
Chips: A Tool for Developing Software Interfaces Interactively.
Descriptive Note:
Technical rept.,
Corporate Author:
PITTSBURGH UNIV PA LEARNING RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER
Report Date:
1987-10-01
Pagination or Media Count:
71.0
Abstract:
Chips is an interactive tool for developing software employing graphical humancomputer interfaces on Xerox Lisp machines. For the programmer, It provides a rich graphical interface for the creation of rich graphical interfaces. In the service of an end user, It provides classes for modeling the graphical relationships of objects on the screen and maintaining constraints between them. Several large applications have been developed with Chips including intelligent tutors for programming and electricity. Chips is implemented as a collection of customizable classes in the LOOPS object-oriented extensions to Interlisp-D. The three fundamental classes are 1 DomainObject which defines objects of the application domain - the domain for which the interface is being built - and ties together the various functionalities provided by the Chips system 2 DisplayObject which defines mouse-sensitive graphical objects and 3 Substrate which defines specialized windows for displaying and storing collections of instances of DisplayObject. A programmer creates an interface by specializing existing DomainObjects and drawing new Displayobjects with a graphics editor. Instances of DispalyObject and Substrate are assembled on screen to form the interface. Once the interface has been sketched in this manner, the programmer can build inward, creating all other parts of the application through the objects on the screen.
Distribution Statement:
APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE
