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The Ultimate GUI Framework: Are We There Yet?

Authors Knut Anders Stokke , Mikhail Barash , Jaakko Järvi

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Knut Anders Stokke
  • University of Bergen, Norway
Mikhail Barash
  • University of Bergen, Norway
Jaakko Järvi
  • University of Turku, Finland

Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the paper. We also wish to express our gratitude for and admiration of Eelco Visser’s life’s work on programming research, and of him as a person.

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Knut Anders Stokke, Mikhail Barash, and Jaakko Järvi. The Ultimate GUI Framework: Are We There Yet?. In Eelco Visser Commemorative Symposium (EVCS 2023). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 109, pp. 25:1-25:9, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.EVCS.2023.25

Abstract

The programming community seems to be forever searching for the ultimate user interface programming approach and the accompanying framework. We describe the landscape of recent efforts in this quest through describing commonalities and differences of modern JavaScript frameworks with respect to their approaches to GUI specifications. We situate both Eelco Visser’s work on WebDSL and our own work on GUI programming in this landscape, and point out areas where more research is needed, including modeling multi-way dataflows and dynamic structures in GUIs.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Graphical user interface languages
  • Software and its engineering → Software libraries and repositories
Keywords
  • Web frameworks
  • GUI specification
  • WebDSL
  • HotDrink
  • WarmDrink

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