Senior Project - Perspective

This project consisted of two parts. The first was to develop a general purpose library of C++ "browser" classes. These classes would make it easy to construct graphical interfaces allowing a user to interactively "browse" through a hierarchy of arbitrary objects. One example might be the browsing of the organization chart for a company. The constructed interface might allow one to pick a particular division in the company and see in a window an image of the director of that division, along with images of each of the department heads reporting to the director. By clicking the mouse on one of the department head images, another window representing that department would appear. That window might contain an image of the department head, along with images of each of the group supervisors reporting to that department head. Finally, one might click the mouse on the image of one of the supervisors to bring up a window showing images of the group supervisor and of each of the members of the group. At any given time, one might double-click on an image to bring up data about that person, e.g. office location, phone number, and electronic mail address. This class library was completely generic, in that it had no knowledge of the type of hierarchy under consideration or of the visual representation of elements in the hierarchy.

The second part of the project was to develop a general purpose UNIX file browser, using the browser class library. This file browser allows one to open windows depicting the contents of directories in iconic form. The user can navigate the file system by clicking the mouse on directory icons. General file manipulation operations, such as file copy, delete, rename, and permission management, can also be performed through the point and select interface. The browser class library and the UNIX file browser were developed using OI (Object Interface -- Solbourne's object-oriented, X Windows and C++-based user interface toolkit), and run on Solbourne's multiprocessor UNIX systems.