Which GUI tookit for quick working prototypes/mockups

Question

I'm primarily a server-side developer - not even web server stuff. But I'm finding more and more that I need to mockup user interfaces. This is in part to more senior roles doing overall product design, but there is some personal interest as well.

I'm wondering what would be a good UI toolkit to learn. I won't be making production user interfaces, and doing them as web apps would just be fine. I've been leaning towards learning jQuery as it has a graphing library I like to use (flot). Someone else at work is suggesting EXT-GWT.

Is there anything else out there? For straight up mockups I use Balsamiq, but sometimes I want to go a little past plain mockups and add some functionality.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I haven't used anything a lot except jQuery.

It has been great especially when you start using the UI and theming which makes quick work of standard things. It'd be a problem if you wanted anything outside the box because then you'd have to find a plugin or write your own. (both of which are fairly easy IMHO.)

Answer 2

If you use ExtJS, they also have a designer: http://www.sencha.com/products/designer

Even if you just go with ExtJS, Senchas has a lot of widgets that make prototyping much easier. ExtJS 4 will be shipping in a month or so. I'd start with it.

http://dev.sencha.com/deploy/ext-4.0-beta3/examples/

Answer 3

If you're just after GUI libraries/frameworks, have a look at GWT and Vaadin.

You might want to also look at something like WaveMaker, which is a rapid application development platform. As well as allowing you to mock up simple GUI's it should make it easy to add in functionality as well.

Answer 4

You can check out ForeUI. It makes working prototype and run as DHTML in browser. It's quite easy to learn and use.