UIML (User Interface Markup Language) is an

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

-based

user interface markup language A user interface markup language is a markup language that renders and describes graphical user interfaces and controls. Many of these markup languages are dialects of XML and are dependent upon a pre-existing scripting language engine, usually a ...

for defining

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

s on computers. Basically UIML tries to reduce the work needed to develop user interfaces. It allows you to describe the user interface in declarative terms (i.e. as text) and ''abstract'' it. Abstracting means that you don't exactly specify how the user interface is going to look, but rather what elements are to be shown, and how should they behave. For example, to describe a message window, you could write: In theory then you could use that description to generate user interfaces for different platforms, like

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s. In practice, the different capabilities of those different platforms make a complete translation difficult. Other less ambitious

domain-specific programming language A domain-specific language (DSL) is a computer language specialized to a particular application domain. This is in contrast to a general-purpose language (GPL), which is broadly applicable across domains. There are a wide variety of DSLs, ranging ...

s attempt only to describe the user interfaces (or other parts of the application or process) in a domain (for example Windows). See for example the Microsoft language

XAML Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML ) is a declarative XML-based language that Microsoft developed for initializing structured values and objects. It is available under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise. XAML is used extensively ...

. These languages do a better job usually, but are less flexible. Today, UIML is being standardized by

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. A separate effort with the same goals as UIML is

UsiXML UsiXML (USer Interface eXtensible Markup Language) is an XML-based markup language for defining user interfaces on computers. UsiXML is a specification language for user interface design. It allows the designer to describe a user interface at diffe ...

UIML implementations

jUIML
– An implementation in

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Swing
UIML.Net
A free UIML renderer written in C#. It has been developed at the Expertise Centre for Digital Media (Hasselt University, Belgium) and can render a UIML document using different widget sets and different platforms. The software is now hosted on GitHub.

References

Open standards User interface markup languages {{compu-lang-stub