A Multi-Step Process for Generating Multi-Platform User Interfaces using UIML

There has been a widespread emergence of computing devices in the past few years that go beyond the capabilities of traditional desktop computers. These devices have varying input/output characteristics, modalities and interaction mechanisms. However, users want to use the same kinds of applications and access the same data and information on these appliances that they can access on their desktop computers. The user interfaces for these devices and platforms go beyond the traditional interaction metaphors. It is a challenge to build User Interfaces (UIs) for these devices of differing capabilities that allow the end users to perform the same kinds of tasks. The User Interface Markup Language (UIML) is an XML-based language that allows the canonical description of UIs for different platforms. We present a multi-step transformation-based framework for building Multi-Platform User Interfaces using UIML. We describe the language features of UIML that facilitate the development of multi-platform UIs, the multi-step process involved in our framework and the transformations needed to build the UIs.