CHIRON

What is Chiron?
The Chiron system provides tools for assisting in the development of graphical user interfaces and provides a run-time system for managing and supporting their dynamic behavior.
The objective of the Chiron system is to reduce long-term costs associated with developing and maintaining graphical user interface (GUI) software. It achieves this objective by providing key interface layers which are resilient to change. In particular, Chiron strongly separates an application from its user interface code, as well as separating the user interface code from the underlying toolkit substrates. Chiron supports the construction of GUIs which provide multiple coordinated views of application objects and allows flexible restructuring of the configuration of those views. Chiron supports a concurrent model of control. While the Chiron architecture supports heterogeneous, multi-lingual systems, the development tools which are part of this release only support clients (applications) written in Ada.
Chiron is a serverized system. The Chiron server and clients run in separate Unix processes. Within a client, artists are active interface agents that are bound to one or more objects. They encapsulate decisions about how objects should be depicted (presentations) as well as how they behave dynamically (dialogs). Multiple artists can be bound to a single object, providing coordinated multiple views of that object. A Chiron client is made up of application code, a set of artists, and client support code. The client support code implements initialization, event detection and routing, and communication with the server. Client support code is automatically generated by client building tools.
Chiron leverages from commercial GUI layout tools. Specifically, Chiron can be used with Sun Microsystem's DevGuide tool to create artists. For those aspects of GUIs which DevGuide is incapable of supporting (e.g. drawing on a canvas), DevGuide and Chiron tools can be used to create an artist template into which the additional graphical aspects can be added programmatically.
The Chiron server manages all aspects of the user interface that are not artist or application specific. It can be thought of as a virtual machine providing a high-level graphical "toolkit" interface to artists by means of an Abstract Depiction Language (ADL). The server receives ADL instructions from the artists and uses them to create and manipulate an internal abstract representation of the graphical interface. The representation is rendered to a concrete depiction (a user viewable image) via calls to the underlying window system. The server also listens for events from the window system (button push, menu selection, etc) and translates them to Chiron events before shipping them back to the appropriate client. The Chiron server provides flexibility in terms of windowing systems and toolkits, application languages, and process inter-connection topology. Although we currently only provide support for Ada clients, it is feasible to provide other language-specific interfaces to the server's ADL.
The Chiron model is highly concurrent. Most components maintain their own, and possibly multiple, threads of control. Thus, unlike most user interface architectures, Chiron avoids imposing sequential control upon tools, allowing the tool, the user interface, and the server, to run in parallel