CIAO: a powerful synchronisation and controlling mechanism for human computer interfaces

The paper demonstrates how an object oriented structural and run-time toolkit architecture, called CIAO, is used to derive a framework for handling user interface dynamics. The approach exploits the object paradigm to build a powerful user interface controlling component in two phases. First, a structural description of the application domain is obtained and then incorporated into dialogue control. This provides the means for relating graphical object behaviour to application functionality. Secondly, dialogue control is further polished to provide a representation describing the correlation of behaviour between graphical objects. Using CIAO, interactive applications are built from four basic component types. The input and output that define the virtual device level, the application that defines the problem domain and the coordinator that defines the mapping between the virtual devices and the application