XANUI: a Textural Platform-Indepedent Model for Rich User Interfaces

In recent years, several model-driven proposals have defined user interface models that can represent both behavioural and aesthetic aspects. However, the software industry has ignored the majority of these proposals because the quality of the rich user interfaces generated out of these models is usually low and their code generators are not flexible, i.e., the UI templates cannot be customised easily. Furthermore, these proposals do not facilitate the separation between the visual design of the UI, normally performed by graphic designers in the industry, and the visualisation of data, which has been previously modelled using another domain-specific language.