An Object-based User Interface For Manufacturing Information Htegration

User interface tool libraries such as Motif tm from the Open Software Foundation (OSF) are becoming increasingly prevalent as standards of form and function for highly functional and attractive graphic user interfaces. However, the software knowledge required to create and manipulate reasonable user interfaces using these tools is very significant in size and scope, and can become pervasive and limiting to application development. In this paper, we present a new tool set (WPTSER) that dramatically reduces the amount of knowledge needed to produce a functional and attractive interface which can be executed interchangeably on OSF/Motif tm or character-cell terminals. WPTSER also provides user input validation through automatically-generated deterministic finite automata from developer-provided regular expressions. To show the capabilities of WPTSER, we use a global query system developed for a Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) system at Rensselaer.