An object-oriented design for user interfaces

The Object-Oriented (OO) design architecture for user interfaces presented in this paper, called IOWARE, is effective, does not violate OO principles, and promotes a high degree of reusability, extendibility, and portability. The innovative features of the design architecture are: [1] the decomposition of interactive applications into atomic and container interactive objects, [2] the use of dynamically manipulable resources to represent all interaction behavior, [3] a generic mechanism that facilitates communication between objects, and [4] a simple and elegant mechanism for composing complex interactive objects. A prototype implementation built on top of Smalltalk is presented