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User Interface Design

  The modular design of the Bayanihan framework allows application writers to create and use different GUIs as desired, as long as these conform to the interfaces required by the objects that will use them. Programmers can create application-specific GUIs to view the same object in different ways, as well as generic GUIs to view different objects in the same way. Figure 3 shows some examples from our Mandelbrot application. On the left is a watcher applet with an application-specific MandelWatchGUI object that displays MandelResult blocks. Colored borders corresponding to different workers give users a sense for the parallelism in the computation. The GUI also allows users to zoom in and out of selected areas, as described in Sect. 4.1. On the right is a worker applet with a generic work engine GUI that provides simple controls for starting, pausing, and stopping the work engine. The window above it is a generic work GUI that displays status and timing information.



Luis Sarmenta
12/9/1998