jpl@esl.UUCP (Jim Leege) (05/25/89)
Since mid-1987, a team of software engineers at ESL, a Subsidiary of TRW, has been developing an interactive user interface builder using X Windows and Ada. The system is called GRAMMI, an acronym for Generated Reusable Ada Man Machine Interface. The GRAMMI system has been released internally and is being used on other ESL projects. The GRAMMI development team will be offering a technical presentation about the system at 3:00 PM on Wednesday, 28 June, at the X'hibition Conference in San Jose, California. GRAMMI was initially developed on monochrome and color SUN 3's running under UNIX 4.2 R 3.4. The GRAMMI system and the GRAMMI-to-application interface code it automatically generates are written in Ada. The public domain X-to-Ada binding from Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) was used to bind GRAMMI to X Windows at the Xlib level. GRAMMI has three main sub-systems: the User Interface Editor (UIE), the MMI Software Generator (MSG), and the GRAMMI Application Environment (GAE). The GRAMMI user composes screens from within the UIE, selecting GRAMMI Widgets (buttons, fields, data plots, forms, resource managers, tuners, etc.) from the MMI Parts Library and customizing them by filling out their attribute forms. (The MMI Parts Library is extensible. Projects can use the existing widgets or add their own.) As screens are composed by the UIE user, corresponding Screen Description Files (SDFs) are composed inside the UIE. The user invokes the MSG to produce application interface code from the SDFs. The application developer connects the application to the interface and binds these with the GAE to produce the target system. If the target system operator doesn't like the lay-out or colors of the MMI, he or she can change them with the UIE, and rerun the GAE with no code rewriting or recompilation! For further information, call Karen Mackey, the GRAMMI Program Manager, at 408-743-6472.