A Unified Pattern Specification Formalism to Support User Interface Generation

The development of interactive software typically requires the combined skills of software developers, HCI, platform and marketing specialists in order to create applications with good software quality, usability, and user experience. The combination of model-based user interface development practices with pattern-based approaches that specify HCI- and software-patterns in a formalized way and respect emerging standards, has the potential to facilitate and automate the software development process, reduce development costs, and provide solutions that can easily be adapted to varying contexts of use. To satisfy these goals we have developed a framework for Pattern-based Modeling and Generation of Interactive Systems PaMGIS. The paper at hand describes the topical version of the PaMGIS Pattern Specification Language PPSL which is designed to accomplish both, capturing all information required to support model-based user interface generation and offering the highest level of compatibility to existing pattern description languages.