Rapid Prototyping and Top Down Development

ViewTouch is all about building the interface first, then making the components of the Interface operate as desired.

The ViewTouch graphical interface allows and encourages the top-down, rapid development of software prototypes. The development of ViewTouch itself has always been a top-down process. The first elements of the program to be developed were the interface components - pages and buttons, which had no specific functionality attached to them, or between them. Once they existed, however, it then fell to the programmers to assign functionality to them, and between them. The user interface's pages and buttons were harbingers of the full-scale, functional form of a new software program.

In any top-down approach an overview of the system is formulated, specifying, but not detailing, any first-level subsystems, but in the case of ViewTouch the not-yet-functional interface revealed the soon to follow functions to be assigned to each button and each page. As each page and its buttons achieved functionality the refinements gave the interface the usefulness in greater detail which users were asking for. Finally, after the development of many subsystem levels, the entire specification foreseen in the first step, the pages and buttons, was reduced to base elements. The ViewTouch top-down model is often specified with the assistance of the interface as a tool for specification, made the process of program development much easier to achieve.