Patent US 6,760,902

A method and apparatus that automatically creates the user interface in an object-oriented software program, without the need for explicit user interface code, is disclosed. The present invention includes a visual object base class with functions that support the creation and management of views, one or more instrumented object classes that are subclasses of the visual object base class and from which instrumented objects are created, and a Visualization Engine. Each instrumented object class defines one or more of the class members to be visual elements that are capable of being represented in the user interface environment. The Visualization Engine interacts with the visual object base class and each instrumented object created from the instrumented object classes, and, using a Global Class Table, a Class Descriptor, a View Descriptor, and an Object Descriptor, creates views of the instrumented objects and maintains synchronicity between the views and the underlying object members by generating the appropriate commands to the operating system.