A Cross-Platform, Adaptable GUI for an Evolving System

Abstract

The Internet has come a long way from where it started decades ago. Today, the variety of tasks that can be accomplished over a network are awe-inspiring. But with this rise of potential comes a necessary rise in the complexity of network communications. It has become harder and harder for network administrators or even individual Internet users to keep track of what is coming in and going out of their computers. Even as it becomes harder to monitor this network traffic, it is becoming increasingly indispensible to have a tool that can track and analyze this traffic to discover any spyware, viruses, or adware that may have infected the computer. The tool being developed accomplishes this task by enabling both individual users as well as network administrators to monitor and analyze network traffic. This tool will be distributed to a wide range of platforms for different purposes. Typically, a piece of software with deployment on multiple platforms requires the developers to create an individual graphical user interface in each language. This is unacceptable, however, for such a dynamic and evolving tool as this one. Instead, an interpreter is created for each platform to generate a GUI from the same simple XML file. A change in user interface can then immediately be delivered across all platforms that the tool is running on simply by editing the single XML file.