User interface management systems: themes and variations a review of the literature

There has been a trend towards the use of graphical direct manipulation interfaces. Many of them are being built using user interface management systems (UIMS). The main guiding principles in the development of UIMS have been the need to re-use interface code, promote interfaces which have a consistent `look and feel´, and to separate the functional part of an application from its interface. UIMS have not been as successful as expected. Their adoption has been slow and at times painful. That is due to a poor understanding of the basic theoretical formalisms, and software design principals for UIMS. The authors review existing UIMS from the perspectives of theoretical formalisms and applications. One of the outcomes of the study is that systems which support an object-oriented (OO) design methodology for interfaces are more likely to be successful