ABSTRACT
The application framework Generic INteractive Application (GINA) has been created in order to define guidelines and to incorporate them into a software tool to be used by the projects implementing assistants. The concept of an application framework has some advantages that are of special importance in the context of the AC project: GINA is based on concepts known from MacApp. When the project started in 1989 the idea of an object-oriented application framework was not completely new. A nontrivial problem with application frameworks is how to tell the programmer which subclasses to create and which methods to override to get the desired result. Our experience has shown that an object-oriented application framework is very well suited to simplify the construction of applications with a graphical user interface. An interface builder is an alternative but an important supplement for the framework. The incremental nature of LISP programming, combined with an application framework and interactive interface builder, makes exploration convenient and fast.
