UI design alternatives with Groovy/JRuby/Jython or other JVM languages ?

Question

For a developer in the Java eco-system, there is a handful of choices when it comes to UI design. The best known are:

• Swing (preferred when used with Netbeans and its GUI builder)
• Eclipse's SWT (mostly preferred for Eclipse plug-ins)

Now, are there any frameworks or design alternatives to this which target JRuby / Groovy / Jython or other "dynamic" JVM languages ?

Some UI frameworks are layers over Swing or SWT, for example, a framework could read a description of a Screen in XML and instantiate the corresponding Swing components.

If you know a framework like that but which targets JVM "dynamic" languages, I'd like to see them in the answers as well.

Answer 1

Not exactly UI design, but you could try Griffon.

Answer 2

I think the two most mature frameworks for Jruby are Monkeybars (http://monkeybars.rubyforge.org/) and Limelight (http://limelight.8thlight.com/).

Monkeybars is a full rubyesque MVC implementation which can be used in conjunction with a Swing GUI builder, whereas Limelight goes for a minimal code / maximum effect ratio like Shoes does.