And the Tool Created a GUI That was Impure and Without Form: Anti-Patterns in Automatically Generated GUIs

Abstract

A basic prerequisite for any daily development task is to understand the source code that we are working with. To this end, the source code should be clean. Usually, it is up to us, the developers, to keep the source code clean. However, often there are parts of the code that are automatically generated. A typical such case are Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) created via a GUI builder, i.e., a tool that allows the developer to design the GUI by combining graphical control elements, offered in a palette. In this paper, we investigate the quality of the code that is generated by GUI builders. To assist tool-smiths in developing better GUI builders, we report anti-patterns concerning naming, documentation, design and implementation issues, observed in a study that involves four popular GUI builders for Java. The reported anti-patterns can further assist GUI developers/designers in selecting appropriate tools.