Comments on: What Happened To The 4GL?

By: rick

rick — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:42:26 +0000

yep the rails could take care of those desires, but as zack says deployment has 99million variations and that can be tough! R Mapquest Driving Directions

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By: Brad Feld

Brad Feld — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:07:33 +0000

Yes, but I was a WEB based application that I can access via a browser from any computer. Can Access 2007 do that?

By: James Mitchell

James Mitchell — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 03:32:30 +0000

If you hired me to design and code a system for you to track you art collection, I would do the following:

1. I would do the table design in Microsoft SQL Server. I would use a hosting company that for $15 a month will give me access to a WISN (Windows Server, IIS, SQL Server, .Net) software stack, so I did not have to set any of this stuff up.

2. I would write the app in Microsoft Access 2007. I know of no tool that allows one to design fairly sophisticated applications in less time than Access. The main downside is that it does not generate Web pages. I could probably have the system done in 1 to 2 days.

But before you hired me, I would say,"You're kidding, right? Is your art collection that big that you need a database to track it???"

James Mitchell

By: zack

zack — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:58 +0000

Everything you list in your 'wants' sounds like something that Rails could take care of for you if you so desire. I'd recommend checking out scaffolds in Rails, particularly the ActiveScaffold plugin http://activescaffold.com/

The one thing that can be a pain though is deployment, as there are 99 million ways to setup a rails app in production.

By: Caligula

Caligula — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:58 +0000

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned DabbleDB, although its online/etc. model may not match what you're looking for.

http://dabbledb.com/

By: Tom Gleeson

Tom Gleeson — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:58 +0000

If you have prior experience of Oracle then you should give Oracle APEX a try (comes with the free Oracle 10g Express edition), very much in the 4GL tradition. But for lots of open source goodness, Chris Keene's WaveMaker would be my choice.

In the non-free category, I've heard good reports of the French developed WinDev ( http://www.windev.com/).

Tom

By: Brenda Duncan

Brenda Duncan — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:57 +0000

May I humbly suggest that you take a look at Servoy? It's close to the old 4GLs – but powerful enough to run on the desktop AND the web – from one code base. There is a free community edition, so you can try it out. We convert many old "4GL-ers". We also get lots of comments about how easy it is to deploy. http://www.servoy.com

By: bfeld

bfeld — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:56 +0000

from an email – Sounds like you want a decent web framework. I use Symfony, a PHP framework that Yahoo! wrote http://www.delicious.com in, but there are 1000 others. It binds your web forms to objects and auto-implements ORM storage to the database layer by default.