Graphical user interface builder

From HandWiki
Short description: Software development tool
NetBeans GUI builder

A graphical user interface builder (or GUI builder), also known as GUI designer or sometimes RAD IDE, is a software development tool that simplifies the creation of GUIs by allowing the designer to arrange graphical control elements (often called widgets) using a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor. Without a GUI builder, a GUI must be built by manually specifying each widget's parameters in the source code, with no visual feedback until the program is run. Such tools are usually called the term RAD IDE.

User interfaces are commonly programmed using an event-driven architecture, so GUI builders also simplify creating event-driven code. This supporting code connects software widgets with the outgoing and incoming events that trigger the functions providing the application logic.

Some graphical user interface builders automatically generate all the source code for a graphical control element. Others, like Interface Builder or Glade Interface Designer, generate serialized object instances that are then loaded by the application.

List of GUI builders

C language based

C# based

C++ based

Objective-C / Swift based

Java based

HTML/JavaScript based

  • DreamWeaver from Adobe (Web Application User Interface Builders) — Obsolete as of 2022
  • Apache Cordova / PhoneGap

Object Pascal based

Flutter framework based

Tk framework based

  • Tk (framework)
    • ActiveState Komodo (No longer[when?] has a GUI builder)

Visual Basic based

Other tools

List of development environments

IDEs with GUI builders (RAD IDEs)

See also

References

  1. "Scene Builder". https://gluonhq.com/products/scene-builder/. 
  2. "FlutterFlow - Build Native Apps Visually". https://flutterflow.io/. 
  3. "FlutterStudio". https://flutterstudio.app/. 
  4. "FALL IN LOVE WITH BUILDING APPS". https://nowa.dev/. 
  5. Speed, Richard (2022-05-06). "RAD Basic – the Visual Basic 7 that never was – releases third alpha". https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/06/rad_basic_alpha_3/. "RAD Basic is not the only game in town. Alternatives in varying stages of development include twinBASIC, which also aims to be backward compatible with VB6 and VBA; and FreeBASIC, which implements much of what lurked in Microsoft QuickBASIC (and has a nifty IDE in the form of VisualFBEditor)."