Interactive user interface design: the chimera UIMS

UIMSs are software components designed to handle the dialogue between user and application, enforcing a separation of application functionality from interface presentation and behaviour, by interpreting user input, providing feedback, controlling the execution of application actions and (ideally) handling application-generated output. Usually, a specification language is available for specifying the syntax of the user-computer dialogue, which is then linked to application functions and compiled into an executable program or interpreted at run-time. The Chimera UIMS is being developed as part of the Druid Project. The goal of Project Druid is to produce a highly interactive user interface design environment to support the style of design described above. Chimera is implemented in C and runs under Unix and the NeWS distributed window system on Sun 3 workstations. It consists of three parts: Chisl (a specification language), Chip (an interpreter) and Chime (an integrated multi-view editing environment). In various ways, each of these components provides support for the interactive design process