Lightweight Low-Level Query-Centric User Interface Modeling

Query languages are usually small, powerful and easy to learn, and that motivated us to investigate their role in modeling user interfaces. We explore annotation of template user interface with queries, especially embedded queries, to achieve partial generation of user interface with the ability to generate user interface with interaction styles such as form fillin and direct manipulation. Our model-driven development approach targets especially highly interactive data intensive applications. While our query-oriented user interface modeling principles have already been applied in an agile development environment, the role of this paper is to present a generalization of query-oriented modeling towards more interaction styles. Our modeling approach is annotation-based, thereby lightweight, and although it operates at a lower level than most current UI modeling approaches, its shows promising potential.