multiple Representations and user-interfaces
In Jini in general and jAugment in particular services abstract from the
known schema of starting a single program and getting a single representation
of it on and only on the local screen and only the screen.
Services are network-wide available that can be accessed only programatically
and from many clients at once.
They have a number of
attributes, that can be atached by thr serivce, the user(through
administrative interface) or other services, and some of these attribues
are representations for the service.
A service can have many representations, not all of them 2-dimensional or
graphical but also aureal(sound), textual or even 3-dimensional.
A service-browser looks for services in the local network and selects one
or more representations for the services or none if no suitable representations
can be found.
A jAugment user-interface is such a service-browser.
You can run multiple such user-interface at once to e.g. access all services
by voice and a text-only-display using the 2 independent TextUIs while using
a 2 or 3 -dimensional representation on a screen using SwingUI. 3DUI or the
upcomming AR-UI (augmented reality).
You can also, very easily, write a new user-interface tailored to your very
special io-facilities and new representations for services that use this
UI. Thus you can build on the work of the existing services and be concerned
only with your new user-io-facilities.