Unobtrusive Support for Asynchronous GUI Operations with Java Annotations

Abstract

The complexities involved in parallel programming encourage frameworks to detach programmers from these concerns via higher-level abstraction. The high-performance nature of parallel computing drifts the focus of these programming environments towards facilitating and safeguarding faster computations. Therefore, aspects such as asynchronous graphical user interfaces (GUIs) do not see as much emphasis, even though many applications today depend on concurrent human-computer interactions. The significance of this topic is growing such that facilitating the efficient management of asynchronous GUI operations is currently a virtue, but will soon become necessary for parallel-programming frameworks. This paper discusses an unobtrusive and annotation-based approach for managing different types of asynchronous GUI operations within the layout of familiar sequential code. The proposed solution minimizes the restructuring of sequential code, in order to simplify developing, testing and maintaining GUI-based applications. Furthermore, the paper presents an implementation of the concept for @PT, a parallel programming environment based on Java annotations. The evaluation discussed in this paper suggests that the proposed mechanism is valid, and demonstrates timely and efficient handling of asynchronous GUI operations.