Rapid GUI development on legacy systems: a runtime model-based solution

Graphical User Interface (GUI) is a common feature for modern software systems, while there are still many legacy systems that do not have GUIs, but only provide text and commands for user interaction. In this paper, we report our experiment on using runtime models to support the rapid, generation-based development of simple GUIs for such legacy systems. We construct runtime models for the target system as an intermediate representations of the underlying system state, and in this way wrap the low-level interaction mechanisms of the legacy systems. After that, we visualize the models with a graphical editor. Due to the causal con- nection between runtime models and the runtime system state, users can monitor and control the system state by reading and writing the models, and in this way, using the graphical model editor as the GUI of the system. Based on the existing framework for runtime model construction and model visualization, it is possible to achieve the rapid devel- opment process of such GUIs in the form of high-level speci- cation and automated generation. We experiment with this idea by using two existing frameworks, Sm@rt and GMF, to develop a series of GUIs for an electricity simulation system named GridLAB-D. We also enhance the existing Sm@rt framework with cache mechanisms in order to suit GUIs.