ICSE '87 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Software Engineering
ICSE '87 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Software Engineering
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A contemporary software engineering problem is to adapt an existing piece of software to a new interface technology.We describe the process of integrating a software engineering tool with a window-based direct manipulation interface. Four stages of this process are described - from a simple integration to a fully integrated system in which it becomes hard to separate properties of the tool from those of the interface.We take advantage of WLISP, an object-oriented, knowledge-based user interface construction kit that contains a large number of tools and intelligent support systems. The object-oriented architecture of WLISP is well suited for making use of existing interface components and tailoring them to the specific needs of the application. This is illustrated by describing the implementation of two of the four integration stages in some detail. Thereby we show benefits and problems of separating the interface from the application system.