Concrete browsing of a graphical toolkit library

Designing graphical user interfaces is difficult and time consuming. Every new design must be started from scratch using only the fixed set of primitive interface components provided by the chosen toolkit. To overcome this problem, the authors propose to encourage the reuse of past designs through a combination of improving browsing technology and of knowledge-based as well as case-based reasoning assistance. Hence the GUIDAR project, for graphical user interface design and reuse. The authors present a two-tiered foundation for an improved browsing technology. First, they introduce spreading computation as a new execution paradigm for search programs, thus enhancing the ability to query and explore a software library. Secondly, the authors propose to let the user browse live instances of graphical components. This they call concrete browsing