Advanced control flows for flexible graphical user interfaces or, growing GUIs on trees or, bookmarking GUIs

Abstract

Web and GUI programs represent two extremely common and popular modes of human-computer interaction. Many GUI programs share the Web's notion of browsing through data and decision trees. The paper compares the user's browsing power in the two cases and illustrates that many GUI programs fall short of the Web's power to clone windows and bookmark applications. It identifies a key implementation problem that GUI programs must overcome to provide this power. It then describes a theoretically well-founded programming pattern, which we have automated, that endows GUI programs with these capabilities. The paper provides concrete examples of the transformation in action.