TeleSoft Corp, the San Diego company best known for its Ada products, claims taht its new TeleUse is the industry’s most advanced user interface management system. TeleUse is designed for interactive creation of user interfaces built on the OSF/Motif schema, and is claimed to reduce the time – by 50% to 90% – the effort and cost of designing user-friendly Unix software. A key feature of TeleUse is that it separates interface code from application code, making the software easier to use and easier to maintain, as well as conferring a high degree of portability across hardware and windowing systems. It frees the developer from having to learn the details of OSF/Motif and the underlying X Window intrinsics toolkit, since the screen layout editor enables the interactive creation of screens, using the WYSIWYG approach to paint the static screen layout on graphics workstations using building block interface objects – buttons, scroll bars, pop-up menus and dialogue boxes. The thing comes with a rule-based dialogue language cheekily called D, used to model the run-time behaviour of the user interface. From the D language, the developer has access to functions for dynamically changing the user interface at run-time. The interface can be tested and modified interactively without concern for the associated application code. TeleUse consists of four components. The first is the VIP graphical layout editor, which enables the developer to combine, edit and modify predefined widgets, as well as widgets created by the developer, by painting them on the screen. The screen description is then stored in a file, allowing the screen to be changed using VIP without recompiling. The D language enables the developer to control the dialogue between the user and the computer by specifying rules or actions to be performed when screen events, such as a button being pressed or a window being activated, occur; it comes with interactive D debugger, D interpreter, and a D compiler, which compiles D language source code to C code. An application interface model is also generated, which specifies the interface between the application code and the D code, enabling D to call functions in the program and the application code to interrupt the dialogue, or both. The User Interface builder takes the description of the screen layout, the dialogue control component, and the application interface model and integrates it with the run-time component and the app lication code, and it comes with a Run-time Library with everything the User Interface builder needs to convert the description files gene rated by TeleUse tools into a work ing program. Out now; no prices.
