Abstract Interface - Specification Languages For Device-Independent Interface Design: Classification, Analysis and Challenges

Abstract

As computing devices become small and heterogeneous, it is inefficient and laborious to design a different version of application interface for each device. There is a need for application interfaces to be able to adapt to different devices. This paper studies abstract interface specification languages as the approach to address device-independent application interface design. It classifies them into three groups, discusses their features and analyzes their similarities and differences. It has identified abstraction level and mapping mechanism as two key issues that need to be well considered to improve the scalability and robustness of such languages.