I need to write a temporary Web-based graphical front-end for a custom server system. In this case performance and scalability aren\'t issues, since at most 10 people may ch
You could try RedUI, it is not ready for production yet, but it should be good for your goal.
The approach is inspired by WPF, you describe your UI out of predefined controls, like Textbox, Combobox, but also some more complicated controls like TreeView or GridView. In the model you also declare you data bindings.
The library will render a window for you.
Then you bind it to the view model, subscribe to events, and add the custom logic that handle those events (e.g. upon "window.closed" you can send the updated view model back to the server).
You can see live examples at http://redui.net/
You can also see the demo application at http://redui.net/mailclientdemo/. This will give you an idea of what you can do.