HP Labs Technical Reports

ACEKit: An Application Construction Toolkit

Zarmer, Craig L.

HPL-91-134

Keyword(s):

Abstract: ACEKit is an application-building toolkit. It is designed to support programmers who are building applications with application-specific components, both for semantics and for presentation. ACEKit defines a protocol that lets user interface components obtain the information they need from applicationcomponents to give timely, application-specific feedback to users. ACEKit also provides an extensible set of high-level interface components that capture interface decisions missed by current toolkits. This paper describes the architecture of an ACEKit-based application, and shows how ACEKit helps make interface design decisions explicit and easily changeable. it also shows how a set of run-time machine-readable descriptions of a component's capabilities can be put to use by a variety of user-interface tools. the application of these descriptions to the construction of "builders" and "builder-readable components" is discussed. ACEKit has been implemented as a C++ class library.

Back to Index