Research On User Interface Conceptual Modeling Language And The Modeling Tool

User interface is the most important way for users to interact with software systems,and in a sense,it is the entire system in user's eyes.The continuous development of information technology makes it available to complete the interaction between users and software systems on different devices or technical platforms.But this change also brings a new challenge to the user interface developers,which is how to effectively develop diverse user interfaces for the same application deployed on different devices.Although the development technology for user interface has been developing many years and many supporting languages and integrated tools arose as well,but a unified method for the development of user interface on different devices or platforms is in lack.The mainstream methods for user interface development mostly are platform-specific and mainly depend on hand coding,and if we separately design and implement different versions of the same application' user interface,there will be many problems like high development cost,low development efficiency and poor reusability.So,we hope the development of user interface could be separated from the final running platform,and only focus on users' requirements regardless of platform-specific technical details when designing user interfaces.By learning from OMG's model driven architecture,a model-driven development method for user interface is studied in the thesis,which separates the development to conceptual modeling phase and model transformation phase.User interface conceptual model built in the first phase is platform-independent,which can be converted into multiple platform-specific models and then into source codes in the second phase.In this way,the reuse of conceptual model and the automatic generation of most source codes can improve the efficiency for building user interface.This thesis focused on user interface conceptual modeling.A user interface conceptual modeling language was defined and a modeling tool,which supports the language,was designed and implemented.The main works in the thesis includes:(1)A user interface conceptual modeling language was defined from the perspective of metamodel,and was normatively represented by means of textual representation and graphical representation which was in the form of class diagram.Some integrity constraints were defined and as the complement to the metamodel,both together constituted the abstract syntax of the modeling language.(2)A graphical user interface conceptual modeling tool was designed and implemented based on Eclipse development environment and EMF/GMF modeling frameworks.This tool supports the visually design of user interface conceptual model,so as to assist the interface designers to complete the conceptual modeling phase's jobs.(3)A set of user interface conceptual modeling methods,which are suitable for the user interface conceptual modeling tool,were summarized and proposed.These methods include some related concepts and modeling strategies and are used to help designers to better understand the modeling language and use the modeling tool.The modeling process of conceptual model was illustrated in a modeling example,which described the application of user interface conceptual modeling methods in practice.