I was working on Chatbots based on the Microsoft BotFramework of late 2016 to early 2017 and was wondering if there is a new way of creating dialogs from a static source like a JSON with the new Framework version 4?
In Version 3 there was this (Microsoft Docs) style. With V4 I can't see such possibilities. In 2017 on some Microsoft conference they talk about some kind of dialogflow builder UI in a deep dive season (sadly all recordings are gone from the ignite library). While I understand this was no super official announcement - are there any tools to use for the business side to build simple dialog flows for the Microsoft BotFramework purely on UI elements?
As you've seen, FormFlow was included in the V3 SDK in two forms: with and without the JSON schema. There actually is a way to use FormFlow in V4, but only without the JSON schema.
The Bot Framework can do many things, as you can see in the documentation. You might have look to see if there's anything that suits your needs.
More UI-based tools and JSON functionality does sound good to me. You might consider making a feature request. Of course, since the SDK is open source it's always possible to build such features yourself. In any case, you should expect to see more Bot Framework enhancements in the future.