From other side, look at amazing TripleX work with panels in LevelEditor

I'm in regular contact with him and I swear, its no magic trick. It could be painful even with nasty tricks to do his menus... copy&paste.. modifying.. copy&paste.. modifying.. (*choke*)

I thought about a window renderer yesterday evening, if it would be faster or so if you write your own window-renderer. So you could define your windows as XML file or so and a script parser runs through it and renders everything into a bitmap. So you could do really horny things muhahaha

seriously, I wouldnt even hesitate to use cscript for this. Before _I_ define 100 panels to simulate a window with checkboxes and so on I would write it on my own.. by the way: its good that Johann implemented that checkbox emulation... but we are far away from a good GUI toolkit/toolset here.