Title :
Re-engineering graphical user interfaces from their resource files with UsiResourcer
Author :
Sanchez Ramon, Oscar ; Vanderdonckt, Jean ; Garcia Molina, Jesus
Author_Institution :
Louvain Interaction Lab., Univ. catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Abstract :
This paper addresses the problem of modernizing graphical user interfaces of interactive applications by re-engineering their resource files in four phases: resource decompilation, which extracts resource files from the executable code of an interactive application; modeling the source user interface, which transforms extracted resources into a resource model; resource to user interface transformation, which transforms the resource model into a Concrete User Interface model, and forward engineering, which offers two alternatives: after editing the user interface model, a new interface could be generated or recompiled into a resource to be incorporated back. The paper motivates and details this re-engineering approach by focusing on methods and algorithms implemented in UsiResourcer, a software tool that reverse engineers MS Windows resource files into a Concrete User Interface Model for further process. A discussion on the generalization of the approach is also provided.
Keywords :
graphical user interfaces; reverse engineering; MS Windows resource files; UsiResourcer; concrete user interface model; graphical user interface; interactive application; reengineering approach; resource decompilation; Analytical models; Graphical user interfaces; HTML; Reverse engineering; Transforms; Unified modeling language; Model Driven Engineering; Modernization; Reengineering; Reverse Engineering; User Interfaces;
Conference_Titel :
Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS), 2013 IEEE Seventh International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Paris
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-2912-5
DOI :
10.1109/RCIS.2013.6577696