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

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.