Implementing A Generalized Drag-and-Drop in X
Cui-Qing Yang and Shrinand Desai
Department of Computer Science
University of North Texas
Denton, TX 76203-3886
cqyang@cs.unt.edu
Tel: (817) 565-2822
Abstract
Drag-and-drop operation is a well-recognized and widely applied
mechanism in the development of graphical user interfaces (GUIs).
Most of current approaches in design and implementation of such a
operation are limited to some specific objects (such as icons or
drag-and-drop widgets), and are usually complex, system-dependent, and
time-consuming. This paper proposes a generalized semantic and
protocol for drag-and-drop that makes the draggable and droppable as
intrinsic properties of any GUI objects (just like the colors and
other appearance of an object) and allows each object to customize its
own semantic of drag- and-drop. Therefore, the drag-and-drop feature
is integrated as an inherent part of a GUI window system and all
details and complexities of its implementation can be hidden from end
users. The framework of generalized drag-and-drop could be applied to
any GUI system. A prototype implementation in the Xt Athena widget
set of X11R5 on a Unix system is reported in the paper.
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