EasyInterface: A toolkit for rapid development of GUIs for research prototype tools
This addresses the need for researchers to share and integrate tools more easily, though it is incremental as it builds on existing command-line execution methods.
The authors tackled the problem of researchers needing to quickly create web-based GUIs for their prototype tools without web programming expertise, resulting in a toolkit that enables command-line tools to be made accessible via a web interface in minutes.
In this paper we describe EasyInterface, an open-source toolkit for rapid development of web-based graphical user interfaces (GUIs). This toolkit addresses the need of researchers to make their research prototype tools available to the community, and integrating them in a common environment, rapidly and without being familiar with web programming or GUI libraries in general. If a tool can be executed from a command-line and its output goes to the standard output, then in few minutes one can make it accessible via a web-interface or within Eclipse. Moreover, the toolkit defines a text-based language that can be used to get more sophisticated GUIs, e.g., syntax highlighting, dialog boxes, user interactions, etc. EasyInterface was originally developed for building a common frontend for tools developed in the Envisage project.