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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T08:54:22+00:00

If we’ve learned anything from HTML/CSS it’s that, declarative languages (like XML) do a

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If we’ve learned anything from HTML/CSS it’s that, declarative languages (like XML) do a good job of describing User Interfaces because:

  1. It’s easy to build code preprocessors that can template the code effectively.
  2. The code is in a well defined well structured (ideally) format so it’s easy to parse.
  3. The technology to effectively parse or crawl an XML based source file already exists.
  4. The UIs scripted code becomes much simpler and easier to understand.
  5. It simple enough that designers are able to design the interface themselves.
  6. Programmers suck at creating UIs so it should be made easy enough for designers.

I recently took a look at the meat of a WPF application (ie. the XAML) and it looks surprisingly familiar to the declarative language style used in HTML.

The current state of desktop UI development is largely fractionalized, otherwise there wouldn’t be so much duplicated effort in the domain of graphical user interface design (IE. GTK, XUL, Qt, Winforms, WPF, etc).

There are 45 GUI platforms for Python alone

What are some Open Source GUI’s that represent these characteristics:

  • standardized
  • platform independent
  • declarative markup language
  • language agnostic

WPF, or more specifically XAML seems like a pretty likely step in the right direction.

Update:

Thanks a lot for the info, keep it comin’. Here’s are the options I’ve gathered from the comments and answers.

GladeXML

  • Editor: Glade Interface Designer
  • OS Platforms: All
  • GUI Platform: GTK+
  • Languages: C (libglade), C++, C# (Glade#), Python, Ada, Pike, Perl, PHP, Eiffel, Ruby

XRC (XML Resource)

XML based formats that are either not free, not cross-platform, or language specific

XUL

  • Editor: Any basic text editor
  • OS Platforms: Any OS running a browser that supports XUL
  • GUI Platform: Gecko Engine?
  • Languages: C++, Python, Ruby as plugin languages not base languages

Note: I’m not sure if XUL deserves mentioning in this list because it’s less of a desktop GUI language and more of a make-webapps-run-on-the-desktop language. Plus, it requires a browser to run. IE, it’s ‘DHTML for the desktop.’

CookSwing

XAML (Moonlight)

  • Editor: MonoDevelop
  • OS Platforms: Linux and other Unix/X11 based OSes only
  • GUI Platforms: GTK+
  • Languages: .NET

Note: XAML is not a pure Open Source format because Microsoft controls its terms of use including the right to change the terms at any time. Moonlight can not legally be made to run on Windows or Mac. In addition, the only platform that is exempt from legal action is Novell. See this for a full description of what I mean.
XAML is also not an ECMA standard like C#, Managed C++, and the CLR.

Update: The question has been changed from “Is there an Open source alternative to WPF? because the original question was wrong, and it sucked. The direction of this question has changed direction to match up to align with the new input. My apologies to the people who responded before it changed.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Qt is developing QML, which looks a lot like XAML except in JSON. It’s available as a preview built against the current version, and is available in snapshots of the next version.

    Here’s a little snippet from http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7-snapshot/declarative-ui-components-progressbar.html 

    import Qt 4.7
import "content"

Rectangle {
   id: main

    width: 600; height: 405
    color: "#edecec"

    Flickable {
       anchors.fill: parent
       contentHeight: column.height + 20

       Column {
           id: column
           x: 10; y: 10
           spacing: 10

           Repeater {
               model: 25

               ProgressBar {
                 property int r: Math.floor(Math.random() * 5000 + 1000)
                 width: main.width - 20

                 NumberAnimation on value { duration: r; from: 0; to: 100; loops: Animation.Infinite }
                 ColorAnimation on color { duration: r; from: "lightsteelblue"; to: "thistle"; loops: Animation.Infinite }
                 ColorAnimation on secondColor { duration: r; from: "steelblue"; to: "#CD96CD"; loops: Animation.Infinite }
               }
           }
       }
   }
}
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