The Dante application interface

The Dante Project is a research effort to design and construct a powerful, uniform user interface for current and future generations of computer workstations. One of its goals is to present to the user a multi-window, multi-tasking interface to a comprehensive set of facilities. Common tools such as shells, programming systems, and editors are integrated as well as more advanced tools such as an extensible frame-based database system. The authors described the application interface, the channel through which programmers access the facilities provided by Dante. The application interface is designed around a declarative, data-oriented philosophy that gives programmers a unique degree of flexibility and control over a large set of facilities. Several examples of its use in implementing application programs are given to illustrate its capabilities