Is there any special tool for interactive GUI development

Question

Hi,

Currently I am preparing exercises about networks and mobile communications for students. I was thinking about creating an interactive user-interface which enables the user to drag&drop predefined elements and then implement a logic based upon element distances etc.

An example would be to place two base stations (a predefined element with several properties), set the scale in the interface and then check the signal interferrence in the environment (user-interface).

The first part might be too abstract whereas the example might be too specific, but I was wondering whether there already exists any friendly framework or language which enables developers to create interactive interfaces (for teaching/learning purpouses) in short ammount of time. Usually I write applications for PC environment in .NET but in this case it would take too much time to create a specific interface for every exercise.

I would appreciate if anyone could suggest any way to create interactive user-interface in short ammount of time. Are there any special programming languages or development tools for this kind of applications or are there any useful frameworks for .NET, Java or any other language to speed up the development of user-interfaces?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Perhaps sketchflow could be of interest

although more intended as a tool for mocking up GUI's. It does also have the ability to hook up behaviours and other short snippets of code to your testgui.

Answer 2

Take a look at Mockingbird. I'm not sure if it's exactly what you are looking for, but it is a pretty sweet web application and works well for the development of UIs (at least the wireframes).

Answer 3

There are lots of tools for this purpose -- but most of them only work well if your user interface follows one of a few fairly well-defined (and widely used) patterns. Just for example, if you're creating a database front-end, there are quite a few tools to make the job quite easy.

One often-overlooked tool for this kind of job is Visio. Visio is normally thought of primarily for drawing and diagramming, but you can also attach behaviors to objects so double-clicking an object can run a macro of your choice, opening forms, doing calculations, etc. The macros are (at least normally) written in VBA, which probably isn't the greatest choice for big projects, but as you said, for a situation like this you're mostly interested in short snippets.

There are, of course, a number of downsides to this, such as the inability (at least AFAIK) to deploy such a diagram as a web-based application. Like Henry Ford's "they can have any color they want as long as it's black", you can respond to any user action you want as long as it's a double-click.

Answer 4

Microsoft expression blend might bee something cool too
http://www.microsoft.com/france/expression/default.aspx