What's your beef with JavaFX? I've been using it recently and it's a surprisingly well designed and nice UI framework. Parts of it are kind of immature and there are occasional surprising holes in its functionality, but that's because the current generation (after dropping the scripting language) is only a couple of versions old.
form {
input {
name = "bob"
label = "Bob"
}
button {
action = #{bean.submit}
}
}
I've actually wrote a C code generator DSL over the top of Win32 many years ago that did this so the financial app I was working on so we didn't have to write millions of dialogs in win32 loops.
That said, I found FXML + IntelliJ to be quite painless. The closing tags are verbose when you have small toy examples but in big files they help orient you by reminding you what the end of a block is. And I mostly use Scene Builder anyway.
