Comprehensive Support for Graphical, Highly-Interactive User
Interfaces: The Garnet User Interface Development Environment

Brad A. Myers, Dario Giuse, Roger B. Dannenberg, 
Brad Vander Zanden, David Kosbie, Ed Pervin, Andrew Mickish, 
and Philippe Marchal

IEEE Computer. Vol. 23, No. 11. November, 1990. pp. 71-85.
Translated into Japanese and reprinted in Nikkei
Electronics, No. 522, March 18, 1991, pp. 187-205.

The Garnet User Interface Development Environment contains a
comprehensive set of tools that make it significantly easier
to design and implement highly-interactive, graphical,
direct manipulation user interfaces.  The lower layers of
Garnet provide an object-oriented, constraint-based
graphical toolkit that allows properties of graphical
objects to be specified in a simple, declarative manner and
then maintained automatically by the system.  The dynamic,
interactive behavior of the objects can be specified
separately by attaching high-level ``interactor'' objects to
the graphics.  The higher layers of Garnet include an
interface builder tool, called Lapidary, that allows the
user interface designer to draw pictures of all graphical
aspects of the user interface.  Unlike other interface
builders, Lapidary allows toolkit items, such as menus and
scroll bars, to be created as well as used, and Lapidary
also allows application-specific graphical objects (the
contents of the application's window) to be created in a
graphical manner.  Other high level tools include an
automatic dialog box and menu editor, and a spreadsheet
program for specifying complex graphical constraints.  This
paper provides an overview of the entire Garnet system.