ABL UI Designer for .w Files – Feedback Wanted

[KevinIlPazzo]

ABL UI Designer for .w Files – Feedback Wanted 💬

Hi everyone! 👋

We’ve been working on API4UI, a Visual Studio Code extension that brings a modern UI designer to OpenEdge ABL .w files. We have a working proof-of-concept and would really appreciate your feedback to help us prioritize what to build next.

Our long-term goal is to build one unified, AI-assisted editor for UI design across multiple languages and frameworks – starting with classic .w files, and expanding to GUI.NET and other UI technologies over time.

A bit of background

API4UI actually started as a low-code platform. With the rise of AI and AI-assisted coding, we realized that traditional low-code “black boxes” don’t have much of a future:

• Generated code was often closed and hard to own or extend.
• Strong vendor lock-in made it risky for teams in the long run.

So we pivoted (target):

• All generated UI code should be open, readable, and modifiable.
• You keep full control, with less vendor lock-in.
• AI tools (code assistants, refactorings, etc.) can now work directly on the generated code.

API4UI is now meant to be a bridge between classic ABL UI and a AI-friendly way of working (coming soon).

We’re also working on a visual designer for GUI.NET (.cls). That work is temporarily on hold in favor of classic .w files, but we’ll open a separate discussion for it soon — and we’ll need your input there as well.

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✅ What’s Working Today

• Drag-and-drop ABL UI designer for .w files

  • Open with: Ctrl + Shift + F8

• Real-time preview of your UI layout and changes

• Property editor for configuring widget properties

• 15+ Progress widgets already mapped & prioritized, including (status ≈ implementation completeness):

  1. "TEXT" → ~90% → Verifying
  2. "FRAME" → ~90% → Verifying
  3. "FILL-IN" → ~90% → Verifying
  4. "BUTTON" → ~90% → Verifying
  5. "RECTANGLE" → ~50% → Planned 24–30/11
  6. "COMBO-BOX" → ~50% → Planned 24–30/11
  7. "TOGGLE-BOX" → ~50% → Planned 24–30/11
  8. "WINDOW" → ~50% → Planned 24–30/11
  9. "BROWSE" → ~50% → Planned 1–7/12
  10. "EDITOR" → ~50% → Planned 1–7/12
  11. "SLIDER" → ~50% → Planned 1–7/12
  12. "RADIO-SET" → ~50% → Planned 1–7/12
  13. "SELECTION-LIST" → ~50% → Planned 1–7/12
  14. "IMAGE" → ~50% → Planned 1–7/12

(We’re actively improving widget coverage and behavior.)

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🙏 We Need Your Input

To make this genuinely useful for ABL developers, we’d love your feedback on:

1. What .w file features are most critical for your workflow?

2. Which Progress widgets do you use most frequently?

   • We want to prioritize the widgets that matter most in real-world screens.

3. What layout / positioning features would help you most?

4. Round-trip editing (.w → API4UI → .w)

   • We already have an automated round-trip tool in our pipeline.
   • To make this robust, we need as many different .w layouts as possible to test all scenarios.
   • Creating good test cases currently takes more than 50% of our effort — we take this very seriously.
   • If you can share (sanitized/anonymized) .w files, that would help a lot.

5. Any other features or pain points?

   • Things you hate about current .w UI workflows
   • “If only I could…“ ideas

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🚀 Try It Out

The extension is available on:

• 👉 VS Code Marketplace: API4UI – UI Designer & Toolbox
• 👉 Windsurf Marketplace: API4UI – UI Designer & Toolbox

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🤝 Get Involved

• Report issues or request features:
  👉 GitHub Issues
• Share .w layouts for testing:
  • Attach them to an issue or discussion, or
  • Email us directly
• Contact us:
  📧 info@api4ui.io

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and real-world use cases!

[API4UI-root]

Adding support for creating new files aka eclipse.
Still under development but can already be tested