GMENUS: An Ada Concurrent User Interface Management System

This paper presents a concurrent User Interface Management System (UIMS) developed in Ada. Application and UIMS modules are constructed as Ada tasks, providing high flexibility and independence of control and communication. Several dialogues can be simultaneously maintained on different windows.The dialogue model is based on state-transition diagrams which we have extended with behaviour properties. By using these properties sophisticated interaction techniques can be built. They also provide another level of concurrency inside a dialogue, thus allowing several states to be active at the same time.Separation between user interface and application is enforced by means of linkage modules, called Application Dialogue Managers.