Author: Michael Sannella
In Proceedings of the 1994 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pages 137-146.
SkyBlue is an incremental constraint solver that uses local propagation to maintain a set of constraints as individual constraints are added and removed. If all of the constraints cannot be satisfied, SkyBlue leaves weaker constraints unsatisfied in order to satisfy stronger constraints (maintaining a constraint hierarchy). SkyBlue is a more general successor to the DeltaBlue algorithm that satisfies cycles of methods by calling external cycle solvers and supports multi-output methods. These features make SkyBlue more useful for constructing user interfaces, since cycles of constraints can occur frequently in user interface applications and multi-output methods are necessary to represent some useful constraints. This paper discusses some of the applications that use SkyBlue, presents times for some user interface benchmarks and describes the SkyBlue algorithm in detail.