Generating UI for Pervasive Devices Using Pattern-Based Approach

It has been shown that the major effort spent on the design and implementation of the system software for pervasive devices (or handset device such as cellular phone) is the user interfaces (UI) . If UI can be developed in a short time, it can be a great help to reduce development time for application software system. Therefore, many researchers in software engineering area have been seeking better solutions to aid UI designers to crate UI. In this paper, we propose a pattern-based approach to generate UI for pervasive device. Specifically, a UI design patterns generator is proposed for UI designers to easily and quickly create the UI patterns for cellular phone. Furthermore, the developed UI patterns can be fine tuned with a visual UI authoring tool to generate the user look and feel of the target cellular phone system under consideration. The generated user look and feel is then as a guider for the program generator to glue the software design framework and associated functions together to produce the target application system code. Finally, In order to demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of the proposed UI design patterns generator, a simulator is designed and implemented for carrying out the software simulation. The benefit of the proposed approach is that it enables UI designers to generate user look and feel easily and quickly, and produces automatically the target UI program without writing any textual code. Thus the proposed approach is very suitable for the UI designers (nonprogrammers). In addition, the developed UI pattern can be reused by UI designers to generate target user look and feel. Therefore, it can reduce development time. Key-Words: UI design patterns generator, Generic UI template, User interface (UI), Visual UI authoring tool, Program generator, Simulator. 1 This research was supported by the National Science Council of Taiwan, the CAISER of National Chiao-Tung University, and the Bestwise International computing Company of Taiwan.