Optimizing Graphical User Interfaces

This project seeks to improve the implementation of two aspects of prototyping toolkits that are used for the development of graphical interfaces: (1) constraints and (2) structured graphics. Its research contribution is the development of compiler techniques that allow rapid prototyping environments to support custom graphics while simultaneously delivering excellent time and storage performance. More broadly, it seeks to put in place tools that advance the objectives of the National Information Infrastructure (NII).

The Problem

Currently constraints and structured graphics are not viable for large applications because they cannot project more than a few hundreds of objects on the screen. The reasons for this shortcoming are twofold:

To ameliorate the difficulties posed by these two techniques in large applications, researchers have developed optimizations such as lightweight glyph objects, constraint plans, and constant propagation that eliminate constraints. However, these innovations sacrifice rapid prototyping by requiring a programmer to program at a low-level. Currently there are no compiler techniques for automatically translating an application written in a high-level protyping environment into a fast, lightweight application that employs these optimizations. A programmer must either reimplement the application in a faster, lower-level toolkit or must provide extensive static declarations as found in Garnet or ThingLab.

Research Strategy

Our research is developing compiler techniques that automatically optimize an application by using static and dynamic profiling strategies that have proven successful in both object-oriented computing and high-performance computing. The profile-based approach to compilation makes use of information that is obtained from the actual execution of a program on example inputs.

We are attempting to optimize interactive graphical applications by automatically instrumenting the code and gathering the required semantic information as the program executes. The semantic information will be used to optimize a program both statically and dynamically. More particularly, as a program executes, the semantic information will be used to:


Funding

This project is being supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CCR-9633624.

Undergraduate Students

Graduate Students

Alumni


Publications

``Optimizing Toolkit-Generated Graphical Interfaces'', 1994 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Marina del Rey, CA, November, 1994, pp. 157-166.

``An Empirical Study of Constraint Usage in Graphical Applications'', 1996 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Seattle, WA, November, 1996, pp. 137-146. With Scott Venckus.

``Compilation of Prototype Objects Using Profile Information'', Submitted to OOPSLA'98. With Lawrence J. Karnowski.

``Using Model Dependency Graphs to Reduce the Storage Requirements of Dataflow Constraints in Prototype-Instance Systems'', Submitted to OOPSLA'98. With Richard L. Halterman.

``Using Model Dataflow Graphs to Reduce the Storage Requirements of Constraints'', To appear in ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction. With Richard L. Halterman.


Software

Pam Interface Toolkit: Interactive, interpreted front-end to the Amulet graphical interface development environment that allows a programmer to rapidly prototype applications by creating graphical objects and callback procedures in Python. Pam is an outgrowth of the adaptive, profile-based compilation project and is used to help us prototype our optimization ideas.