Developing application independent interfaces for workstations in a distributed environment

The development of suitable user interfaces to applications can be a difficult task. This task is further complicated when designing applications to operate in a distributed environment where one could take advantage of powerful workstations. This paper reports on current work investigating approaches for specifying and designing application interfaces in a distributed environment. In the approach being investigated, the application's interface is specified separately from the application code itself and can be interpreted by a user interface manager (UIM). The UIM can be operational on a workstation and the application code executed on a different host. The paper presents an overview of the general model, briefly describes one approach for the definition of interfaces and outlines how the UIM and the application communicate.