I used to use a Java-oriented IDE called “Visix Vibe”, at first as an experiment in application development with Java and then as an alternative to Delphi, which was my bread and butter tooling environment for custom application development.

Both of these IDE’s gave me a huge productivity boost, and it used to be a no-brainer to give customers a realizable estimate for getting the UI done, then wiring up logic, and get things ready to ship, etc.

I really miss these IDE’s, because of the integration factor. It was fun to wire up a database table and generate a form and immediately have something that could be used for data input and validation on the project - then spend a few weeks refining the UI to be more robust and cater to the application use case in focus.

These days, it feels like a lot more careful planning is needed to make sure the UI/API/backend realms can play properly together.

It would be nice to see some more progress on this level of tooling. It’s one thing to have an AI generate UI code - but I still think there is room for painting the code and using a UI to build a UI.

(The moment someone produces a properly WYSIWYG tool for JUCE, the glory days will begin again ..)

You may laugh, but that is how I use html forms today. Simple. And effective.