I have read this two posts:
What are alternatives to ExtJS?
free and open source alternative to extjs
Is there any freeware Ui designer for any of there frameworks?
I want to build a web file-browser
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why don't you build one with extjs? :p – Neil McGuigan Dec 10 '11 at 18:34
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What is a "Ui designer" in your world? Do you mean a graphical editor where you can click and drag visual elements (e.g. buttons), to build up the UI for your app? – ThomasH Dec 11 '11 at 10:16
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In general, you might check out this post: HTML/JavaScript UI widgets GUI builder
Consider while looking at different tools that some might require special server back-ends. qooxdoo as a toolkit is all client-side.
The rest of this post concerns only qooxdoo and I don't think there are any mature ones available for qooxdoo right now. At least, there are none that are on par with the likes of the experience of developing in Visual Studio and with WinForms (as simply a comparison.) There are some early immature tool attempts at doing similar things, but they still will require a good understanding of qooxdoo and form placement. This is not a complete list:
- qooxit: This is a project by Derrell Lipman who is very active as part of the qooxdoo development, but I'm not sure what has become of the future of this project. http://qooxdoo-contrib.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/qooxdoo-contrib/trunk/qooxdoo-contrib/qooxit/
- jsqt: Uses Qt's .ui files and translates them. I have not used this and my guess is it has many limitations. http://qooxdoo.org/contrib/project#jsqt
- Qooxdoo.Net: Uses Visual Studio to design the UI, but the project looks dead. http://sourceforge.net/projects/qooxdoonet/
I think there were also some attempts to put a WYSIWYG designer in front of the XML to qooxdoo tool called QxTransformer, http://qxtransformer.org/ but I may be confusing my projects.
Note that the qooxdoo license is dual licensed to LGPL/EPL. If you are working in a commercial environment some corporations are skittish of anything that isn't MIT or BSD licensed. I mention this in regard to your reference to the "free and open source" alternatives. While I firmly believe the intention of the application of LGPL/EPL is to allow us developers to do whatever we want with our creation as long as we contribute back to any enhancements to the qooxdoo libraries, corporate lawyers are afraid of nothing specific in writing. If you are doing this for commercial organization do your homework first. I had wanted to use qooxdoo for a project, but was prevented because of the license and my companies leaning toward MIT/BSD only open source licenses.
As a library goes, I think qooxdoo is the most feature complete and best structured. It is well documented though it does come with a learning curve. However, examples abound and the forum is very responsive. If there is any criticism about qooxdoo it might be that it is a heavier weight (size) library so that the final compiled javascript is often large (500-700k). For complex applications it can be a bit too intensive for smart phones and first generation iPads. However, nowadays this becomes less and less an issue and the mobile side of qooxdoo is evolving rapidly to provide a lighter weight solution. Basically, it keeps getting better and better.
Finally, here is a link to a discussion amongst qooxdoo developers about creating an IDE. http://qooxdoo.678.n2.nabble.com/qooxdoo-quot-IDE-quot-Request-for-Comments-td3782909.html
From experience I think manual (text editing) form design is tedious and error prone and a tool to make it easier would be a godsend. qooxdoo's structure and "extends" capability would make it a prime candidate for a IDE implementation like Visual Studio uses with WinForms and .NET.
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One other item to add is this link on qooxdoo's site: http://qooxdoo.org/documentation/general/faq#are_visual_gui_builders_available – ArnisAndy Dec 27 '11 at 16:32
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The DHTMLX library comes with a free online UI designer tool.
The library itself is dual licensed: GPL and commercial. The commercial license includes the desktop version of the UI designer.
There is also file explorer demo built with the dhtmlx components.
(Disclaimer: I work for DHTMLX).
Paul
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Before switching to Ext, we used the Yahoo libraries. We were using the old version YUI2, but version 3 is apparently also very good. It has many similar components such as grids (datatables) , menus, calendar widgets, etc.
sam
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