Best language for quickly creating user interfaces without drag and drop? [closed]

Answer 1

I'd probably try using C#. It has reasonably friendly interfaces to windows common controls and the like even without making use of Drag and Drop. Just don't make use of the designer and code as normal.

Answer 2

Check out this project on codeplex. It may help you (as an alternative to processing&java) http://bling.codeplex.com/

ling is a C#-based library for easily programming images, animations, interactions, and visualizations on Microsoft's WPF/.NET. Bling is oriented towards design technologists, i.e., designers who sometimes program, to aid in the rapid prototyping of rich UI design ideas. Students, artists, researchers, and hobbyists will also find Bling useful as a tool for quickly expressing ideas or visualizations. Bling's APIs and constructs are optimized for the fast programming of throw away code as opposed to the careful programming of production code.

Bling as the following features that aid in the rapid prototyping of rich UIs:

* Declarative constraints that maintain dynamic relationships in the UI without the need for complex event handling. For example, button.Width = 100 - slider.Value causes button to shrink as the slider thumb is moved to the right, or grow as it is moved to the left. Constraints have many benefits: they allow rich custom layouts to be expressed with very little code, they are easy animate, and they support UIs with lots of dynamic behavior.
* Simplified animation with one line of code. For example, button.Left.Animate.Duration(500).To = label.Right will cause button to move to the right of label in 500 milliseconds.
* Pixel shader effects without the need to write HLSL code or boilerplate code! For example, canvas.CustomEffect = (input, uv) => new ColorBl(new Point3DBl(1,1,1) - input[uv].ScRGB, input[uv].ScA); defines and installs a pixel shader on a canvas that inverts the canvas's colors. Pixel shading in Bling takes advantage of your graphics card to create rich, pixel-level effects.
* Support for multi-pass bitmap effects such as diffuse lighting.
* An experimental UI physics engine for integrating physics into user interfaces! The physics supported by Bling is flexible, controllable, and easy to program.
* Support for 2.5D lighting.
* A rich library of geometry routines; e.g., finding where two lines intersect, the base of a triangle, the area of triangle, or a point on Bezier curve. These routines are compatible with all of Bling's features; e.g., they can be used in express constraints, pixel shaders, or physical constraints. Bling also provides a rich API for manipulating angles in both degrees and radians.
* And many smaller things; e.g., a frame-based background animation manager and slide presentation system.
* As a lightweight wrapper around WPF, Bling code is completely compatible with conventional WPF code written in C#, XAML, or other .NET languages.

Bling is an open source project created by Sean McDirmid and friends to aid in design rapid prototyping. We used Bling to enhance our productivity and would like to share it with other WPF UI design prototypers.

Answer 3

Tcl/Tk will do exactly what you want. The pack and grid layout managers are based on logical relative placement of the widgets.

Although the "native" language of Tk is Tcl, many other languages have a Tk binding.

label .l -text "this is a label"
button .b -text 'quit' -command "exit"
pack .l .b

Answer 4

I don't program in Java but I know that Java provides for the programmatic creation of the UI AND provides some wonderful Layout Management components (Native to Java without requiring SWING). I first got exposed to Layout Managers back in the good-old-days of X11 with X Toolkits (anybody remember Motif, OpenLook, HP Open View?) and Java seems to have adopted similar technology.

You can create Windows, Dialogs and Menus all from simple layout managers.

Answer 5

I would say that xaml would be a good choice:

• Pixel manipulation is not needed
• Item functionality in code behind
• Can add pixels changing for control later on
• There is a lot of documentation on how to use it

Maybe if you give us an idea of what you will need the language for we can give you better suggestions.

Answer 6

You could use javascript and html. There's a port of processing to javascript, so you know that it is powerful enough for the things that your class will cover. You can author html without knowing a single thing about what it looks like. In fact that is the preferred way to author html.

The main downside of javascript is not javascript itself, but the browser dom. That is the interface into controlling the html elements. However, a library like jquery, or mootools, or dojo can take care of most of those problems.

As for accessiblity, have a look at WAI ARIA also opera's intro to WAI ARIA.a

WAI ARIA is a way to build rich javascript applications while playing nice with screen readers. It's very cool. I've not seen more work and passion put into making the web stack accessible in any other programming stack.