Seeking the user interface

Abstract

User interface design and coding can be complex and messy. We describe a system that uses code search to simplify and automate the generation of such code. We start with a simple sketch of the desired interface along with a set of keywords describing the application context. We then use existing code search engines to find results based on the keywords. We look for potential Java-based user interface solutions within those results and apply a series of code transformations to the solutions to generate derivative solutions, aiming to get solutions that constitute only the user interface and that will compile and run. We run the resultant solutions and compare the generated interfaces to the user's sketches. Finally, we let programmers interact with the matched solutions and return the running code for the solutions they choose. The system can be used not only for generating initial user interface code for an application, but also for exploring alternative interfaces and for looking at the user interfaces in a code repository.