Interactive cooperative objects: an object-oriented formalism based on Petri nets for user interface design

While direct manipulation, window based interfaces have already reached a wide audience, available interface design methods still do not provide the qualities of simplicity, reliability, reusability and provability that are expected in a software engineering approach. This paper presents an interface design method aiming at those goals. This method, called interactive cooperative objects takes its foundation in the object oriented approach for its structuring schemes and in high-level Petri nets for the design, execution and analysis of dialogue structure. It also handles user-interface specific concerns such as graphic presentation and composition of interface components into dialogue units. The main concepts of the method are detailed in this paper. The last part highlights the main advantages of this approach and future investigations