A WYSIWYG ADD-ON DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT FOR THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE APPLICATIONS

Abstract

Software rarely fulfills the demands of all users in its initial development stage. Mindful of the importance of making software adaptable to individuals, developers typically could enhance their software by allowing reconfiguring user interfaces and/or add-ons that can modify software behaviors, leaving the original main program unchanged. However, many software applications support limited or no add-on architecture, due to additional overhead in software design, development, and maintenance. This thesis presents the WADE IDE, which enables easy modification of GUI-based software applications without access to their source code. WADE retrieves the host application¿s GUI hierarchy by injecting a dynamically-linked library (DLL) into the host program, and converting this information to a declarative language, thereby enabling GUI modifications in a WYSIWYG fashion through a GUI editor. The GUI editor also provides direct association of event handlers with GUI widgets, greatly simplifying the job of modifying not only appearance but also software behavior.