Hewlett-packard Company

Altia, Inc.

Thomas Joseph Walton

Thomas Rudolph Batcha

Kipper Kyle Fulghum

Roy L Johnson

Michael T Juran

Eric J Kuzara

Michael Thomas Juran

Thomas F Kraemer

A system for designing, testing, and employing graphical computer code includes a graphics editor for creating a graphical display. The graphical display is made up of a plurality of graphical objects constructed by the graphics editor. A translator creates a high-level computer language code of the graphical object. The translator is connected to the graphics editor. A compiler receives the high level computer language code from the translator.

System and method of designing, testing, and employing graphical computer code

A system for providing a simple, easy to learn and flexible means of creating user interfaces to products under development without the need of a programming language or the need to learn a large set of complicated commands. The Visual Software Engineering ('VSE') system of the invention uses a simple concept of defining both input to and output from graphical objects in an object-oriented system by providing examples of what the user desires the graphical object to do. This technique is referred to herein as 'animation by example'. In accordance with this process, the user creates a user interface by drawing the user interface with a graphics editor and then defining the output behavior (i.e., graphics manipulation) of the user interface components by showing each state or frame as an animation. This is accomplished by changing the object using a graphic editor function such as move or rotate and storing each of the frames with the object as a behavior state. Just as with defining the output, the input is defined by giving the graphic object an example of what type of input to look for, and once it finds that input, it tells the object which frame to output or change to. Application code can then drive the animation or read the input by accessing the frame numbers assigned to each of the example frames.

Visual software engineering system and method for developing visual

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Colorado Springs, CO, United States of America

Thomas Joseph Walton