Prior art for Graphical Instance Instantiation

Question

Microsoft filed US20120227028 Graphical programming object population user interface autogeneration, which describes the automatic generation of GUIs to instantiate objects. I vaguely recall seeing a implementation of this concept in Java somewhere. Are there any other examples of prior art, or is my memory just bad? Here is the claim 1:

A computer-readable non-transitory storage medium configured with data and with instructions that when executed by at least one processor causes the processor(s) to perform a process for utilizing an instance of an object type in a graphical programming environment, the instance having at least one field defined by the object type, each field of the instance having a name and capable of being assigned a value, the process comprising the steps of:

• receiving a selection that identifies the instance of the object type;
• automatically determining what fields are defined for the object type instance;
• automatically generating an instance data population user interface in the graphical programming environment;
• and displaying at least the following in the user interface:
  • the name of each field that is defined for the object type instance,
  • and a currently assigned value for each field that currently has an assigned value.

Answer 1

Sounds like Naked Objects. Apache Isis is mentioned in the Wikipedia article. I remember running something similar for C++ in the late 90's.

Answer 2

Well, a good place to look would be the NetBeans release notes:

http://netbeans.org/community/releases/old.html

NetBeans is a Java IDE that's rougly the Java equivalent a Visual Studio. Seeing that Microsoft's patent was issued in 2012 and NetBeans has been around for a while, you might find something there.

Answer 3

Would something like Glade count?

What is Glade?

Glade is a RAD tool to enable quick & easy development of user interfaces for the GTK+
toolkit and the GNOME desktop environment.

The user interfaces designed in Glade are saved as XML, and by using the GtkBuilder GTK+
object these can be loaded by applications dynamically as needed. 

Answer 4

Interface Builder from NeXTStep through to versions shipped with Xcode 4.x carries out the process of interface design and the resultant files are instantiated into GUI objects as described in the patent application. See the discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder this shows that Interface Builder dates from 1988 according to the wikipedia article. Interface builder has been available under OSX since first release and does indeed provide user interface object instantiation at run time from text file definitions. Glade provides similar mechanisms for constructing interfaces using a GUI. The files are instantiated into GUI objects see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glade_Interface_Designer this dates from 1998.

Answer 5

I think that many of the claims there looked like it was describing original Smalltalk implementation at the Palo Alto Research Center (early '70s), or code that would be trivial to have implemented on that system.

Answer 6

My reading of this is that it's not talking about a UI design tool (like Interface Builder or Glade), but rather about a GUI for editing objects: you click on an object, and it displays an editable list of all the properties associated with that object. Which is precisely what every graphical database front end in the world does. Or, if you interpret it more as "automatically generating a GUI for editing data", Ruby on Rails or something similar would be an appropriate precedent.