Toolkit Design for Interactive Structured Graphics
Toolkit Design for Interactive Structured Graphics
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Date
2003-01-21
Authors
Bederson, Benjamin B.
Grosjean, Jesse
Meyer, Jon
Advisor
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Abstract
In this paper, we analyze three approaches to building graphical applications
with rich user interfaces. We compare hand-crafted custom code to polylithic and
monolithic toolkit-based solutions. Polylithic toolkits follow a design
philosophy similar to 3D scene graphs supported by toolkits including Java3D and
OpenInventor. Monolithic toolkits are more akin to 2D Graphical User Interface
toolkits such as Swing or MFC. We describe Jazz (a polylithic toolkit) and
Piccolo (a monolithic toolkit), each of which we built to support interactive 2D
structured graphics applications in general, and Zoomable User Interface
applications in particular. We examine the trade-offs of each approach in terms
of performance, memory requirements, and programmability. We conclude that, for
most applications, a monolithic-based toolkit is more effective than either a
hand-crafted or a polylithic solution for building interactive structured
graphics, but that each has advantages in certain situations.
Keywords
Monolithic toolkits, Polylithic toolkits, Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs),
Animation, Structured Graphics, Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), Pad++, Jazz
(UMIACS-TR-2003-03)
(HCIL-TR-2003-01)