Customer GUI Design Tool
Senior Project: 2000-2001
Nicholas Gloe, Robert Moore III, Bradley Shaffer and Jeffrey Shoup
Avolent, Inc. is an emerging technology firm focused on providing advanced
Internet Customer Care (ICC) and Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment
(EBP&P) solutions for industries including communications, utility and
financial services. Avolent's customers use the Avolent product either on their
own websites, or via a web site hosted by Avolent for that company.
The Avolent architecture makes use of page components that can be used in
multiple places to provide part of all page functionality. While this is
flexible and powerful, it requires that Avolent's clients know XML and XSL in
order to enhance the core Avolent application.
The goal of the project was to design and create a GUI Designer tool that would
allow Avolent's customers to make new screens, add new workflows, and create
new user experiences using a Java application. The page components "advertise"
themselves to the tool and allow the user to arrange them and test how the new
page would look. When the GUI creator is satisfied, the tool outputs the
necessary metadata to a running Avolent application so that the application can
immediately pick up the new functionality.
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