Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
message
sending
Controller
View
Model
C
V
M
P
2
update
gimme [<slot_name>]
↑
↓
set [<slot_name>] <value>
↓
P
1
C
V
M
Fig. 6.
Standard messages used for the interoperation between a child pad and a parent pad
Our synthetic media architecture also provides other types of interoperability
among pads. Drag-and-drop of a pad on another pad may invoke the target pad to
process the object pad in some way like making its copy or analyzing its construction
structure to visualize.
3
Synthetic Media System as a Toolkit for Developing Client
Systems
Around 1993, major IT companies like Fujitsu, Hitachi Software Engineering, Fuji
Xerox, NTT, and NEC became interested in using the synthetic media system
IntelligentPad for developing client systems, and established a consortium. For this
purpose, Fujitsu and Hitachi Software Engineering jointly developed a C++ version of
IntelligentPad system in collaboration with our group in 1995. Several years later,
US-based venture company K-Plex released another commercial version Plex Ware.
The accumulation of reusable components as pads in each company gradually formed
a sufficiently large library, and allowed its application developers to use
IntelligentPad as a toolkit for constructing each application of some typical type
within a significantly reduced time, say one thirtieth of the conventional way of
development. They also reused a common construction structure of composite pads
developed for similar applications. Such a common construction structure for a
specific type of applications, together with a set of reusable pads for the same type of
applications, forms its application framework. Figure 7 shows a typical application
framework for form interface systems of databases [6]. It consists of a database pad
which communicates with a database system, several buttons, a query input pad, and a
record pad which holds one of the records retrieved from the database. A record pad
has several child pads, each displays a text, a number, or an image depending on
which slot of the record pad it is connected to. This application framework is nothing
but what was provided by each major database management system as a form
construction kit in mid 90s.
