Developed under X Windows and Motif, the Empress GUI Builder provides a powerful object-oriented development environment for creating aesthetically pleasing, interactive and graphical applications. The Empress GUI Builder minimizes the programming required to access and display information stored in the Empress database, including variable length, binary or multimedia data such as images, sound, and text.

The Empress GUI Builder makes many different objects available for inclusion in applications such as toggle buttons, dialog boxes, lists, and sliding scales. Several types of menus can be built including pull-down, pop-up, option and cascading menus. Hypertext help screens can be built into the application; the formatted text can have links, which, when clicked, can bring up more help.

Empress GUI Builder also provides image fields and audio fields to easily present image and audio data to the user. Several images or image and sound can be shown simultaneously for rapid building of multimedia applications.