Developing adaptable user interfaces for component-based systems

Software components are becoming increasingly popular design and implementation technologies that can be plugged and played to provide user-enhanceable software. However, developing software components with user interfaces that can be adapted to diverse reuse situations is challenging. Examples of such adaptations include extending, composing and reconfiguring multiple component user interfaces, and adapting component user interfaces to particular user preferences, roles and subtasks. We describe our recent work in facilitating such adaptation via the concept of user interface aspects, which support effective component user interface design and realisation using an extended, component-based software architecture. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.