[Tutor] OT: Drag and Drop GUI IDE ideas

[Alan Gauld]

Rance Hall wrote:

> We want the students to develop a small app in the process, It could
> be a firefox extension, mobile phone app, or any other type simple
> structure.

ou can develop very smpleAndoid apps witout any coding using a 
Googletoolit. I've only read an aticle aboutit so an't sy how 
cleveritgets or how easy itreallyis to use. The problermisthat building 
apps, especially GII apps is not an easy thing to do.

The easiest environment is probably, and I hate to say it
- Visual Basic!
And there is a free version but you'd need to check the usage
limits (I'm sure there will be some!) But you could use the
Microsoft office VBA environbment instead - and thats a
tool they will probably have in the real world...


> The catch is that the class is for non-programmers to try to get them
> introduced to the field.  We would like to use a gui ide that can
> essentially hide the code from the programmer and connect widgets with
> the gui.
> 
> We want them to be able to look at the code and analyze it.

VB would allow that.

Another option is The Apple Mac development tool XCode and
the Apple GUI builder - free if you have MacOS X. It uses a graphical 
representation to connect code to widgets but it is less intuitive than 
the VB approach (but much more powerful!) You can read through the short 
Cocoa tutorial on the apple developer site to see it in action.

Dabo might be an option for a Python solution but I findit a tad too 
data centric. But for business types that might not be a bad thing!

HTH,

Alan G