RBE: Rendering By Example

Rendering is defined to be a customized presentation of data in such a way that allows users to subsequently interact with the presented data. Traditionally such a user interface would be a custom application written using conventional programming languages; in contrast we propose an application-independent, declarative (i.e., what-you-want) language that we call Rendering By Example, RBE, with the capability to specify a wide variety of renderings. RBE is a domain calculus language over user interface widgets. Most previous domain calculus database languages (e.g., QBE, LDL, Datalog) mainly addressed the data processing problem. The main contribution in developing RBE is to model semantics of user interactions in a declarative way. This declarative specification not only allows quick and ad-hoc specification of renderings (i.e., user interfaces) but also provides a framework to understand renderings as an abstract concept, independent of the application. Further, such a linguistic abstraction provides the basis for user-interface research. RBE is part of the ICBE language that is being prototyped in the Picture Programming project at HP Labs.