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The ProtoJ Prototyping Tool
Abstract
At California Polytechnic State University, students in the undergraduate software engineering courses need a complete, easy to use tool for quickly creating a customized user interface. There are several graphical interface builders, such as Visual Basic and Forte, that could be used to build prototypes for software packages. However, since they are full-featured application development tools, they can be complicated to learn and require special training and take weeks or months to learn. In a ten weeks time, it is not feasible for students to use these tools to create prototype of their project since they need a while to learn how to use them.
Therefore, a new and easy to use prototyping tool is needed. This project is aiming at creating such a prototyping tool that will allow students to rapidly prototype new user interfaces. Elements of a graphical interface builder and drawing editor are combined together in this prototyping tool. Students can draw pictures or objects and make them behave like buttons or active components. Properties of each component can be changed through a component property editor. This tool also provides the alternative to call static methods in various classes via command line rather than using the drop down menus.