One of the most promising types of tools to be developed in recent years is the interactive user interface builder. These tools are known by different names depending on their exact capabilities. This paper simply refers to all such tools as builders . A user interface builder allows programmers to draw and test an interface interactively without writing code. In many cases, such tools can have an extremely beneficial effect on a programmers' productivity during the early development and design stages.
Users can press buttons, type in text and so on.
By reducing the time a programmer spends compiling and debugging, a builder can greatly reduce the amount of time required to create a first prototype of a user interface. Using a builder allows a programmer to show a realistic prototype of an interface to potential users before committing the design to code. Most such tools can produce code that corresponds to the interactively-developed interface. Since generated code will normally be free of syntax errors, programmers can typically have a running program with a complete user interface after the first compilation. Not everyone has been successful using user interface builders in the past, largely due to limitations in the technology.