Very simple, terse and easy GUI programming “frameworks” [closed]

Solution 1:

Not to kid, but HTML.

It's cross-platform, and sums up the gui-layout in a simple textfile. It's definitely mature, as well as well-understood and well documented.

There's a bunch of ways to template HTML files for dynamic content, and other ways to convert custom syntaxes to HTML if you dislike angle-brackets.

Client-side scripting w/ Javascript, server-side scripting with PHP/Ruby/Python/Perl.

It's not well suited for all purposes, but for many, it's good enough. There's no reason that it has to be served either - you can distribute a HTML file to your clients if you want - see TiddlyWiki for a good example of where that can go.

Solution 2:

What you're describing is, with the exception of shoes, the new-fangled notion of declarative programming. I'd describe shoes more as a GUI Domain-Specifc Language. Well, I say new-fangled: Visual Basic forms, if you looked behind the IDE designer, were declarative. So, going further back still, were Oracle's SQL*Forms, although assembling them with a text editor was a process only to be be undertaken by the very bravest.

To add another to the list, Microsoft have XAML which, among other things, describes GUIs built for the WPF.

Although some of the schemes mentioned are fairly simple, declaratively-defined GUIs can be as complex as anything defined in code, they're just easier and terser: they say "what" you want to happen and leave it to the underlying framework to handle the "how".