Best language for quickly creating user interfaces with out drag and drop?

Question

I'm a blind college student who is taking an introduction to programming class that focuses on user interface design. The class is using processing which is completely inaccessible. I'm looking for a language that will allow me to create GUI's with out drag and drop and hopefully be smart enough to do most of the layout with out forcing me to specify control positions in pixels. I know Perl, Java, C/C++, c#, and HTML. I was considering creating HTA applications. My only requirements are that the language must run under windows, and must not use SWING or GTK as the underlying toolkit.

Answer 1

take a look on XAML. I think it could be a good start for both modern Windows and Web UI creators.

Answer 2

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 3

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 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

Being sighted myself and not having worked too closely on anything that has ever been audited for accessibility or heavily accessed by blind users, I don't think my answer will be terribly thorough. My first instinct however is to say that some kind of dynamic web server architecture that generates HTML like C#, PHP or ColdFusion is going to fit your description of handling most of the layout for you without requiring that you specify control positions in pixels. There certainly is the availability to specify control positions in pixels via CSS, but it's not required. And I know HTML also has well defined standards for accessibility, whereas I'm not sure what the status is on accessibility standards with other kinds of software.

Answer 6

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 7

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.

Answer 8

Speaking as a blind programmer:

• C# + WinForms: You can either create the code by hand and use layout managers or calculate the sizes in your head, or if you're using the JAWS screen reader then there are scripts which will help you in the WinForms designer.
• C# + WPF: Here you define your UI in XML, but it is more complex to get your head around. Certainly look at this as it is a very nice solution. the other problem with WPF at the moment is that not all screen readers support this newer technology.
• Jamal Mazrui at www.EmpowermentZone.com has created something called "Layout By Code", but I have no experience with this.
• HTML+Javascript would be nice, but I doubt it'd be allowed in your course.
• WXWidgets: I don't have a lot of experience with this cross-platform, multi-language UI toolkit, but I believe it has layout managers and is thus used by several blind programmers I know.
• Finally, I used to design Win32 resource scripts by hand, calculating sizes in my head (no layout managers). This is certainly achievable if you wanted to take this route.

In summary, WPF's nice, but make sure your screen reader works with this kind of app. The next best alternative is probably WinForms. If you like Layout By Code then use it, but if this is a skill you want for employment, then keep that in mind.

Answer 9

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.