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

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

http://dabbledb.com/

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

Tom

I now have Mitchell Kertzman (of PowerBuilder fame) and Roger Sippl (of Informix 4GL fame) on the WaveMaker board, so we have the pedigree part of 4GL down!

You put your finger on the elephant under the table in programming today – it is no longer possible for mere mortals to build basic business applications.

Ten years ago, there were loads of ways to build client/server apps easily – PowerBuilder, MS Access, Lotus Notes, Filemaker. Today, none of those tools have made the leap to web architectures, leaving a huge market vacuum.

It has been so long since there have been decent tools for non-expert developers that people have literally forgotten what a 4GL even looks like. The best proof of this s the many comments on this thread by people who think that coding frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django are reasonable substitutes for a 4GL.

This is not to slight Rails and Django, just to say that these products are targeting making hard-core developers even more productive. The underserved market here is all us poor pre-OO schmucks who just want to build a simple app without getting a PhD in Python (I prefer wine cellar management apps to art collection management apps but there you go).

Force.com pretty much defined the 4GL in the cloud space, but is of course pretty SalesForce specific. Coghead and Bungee are definitely the leaders in the independent cloud 4GL space.

What is missing is a good open-source IDE for the cloud that uses standard languages like Javascript and Java. Aptana has an interesting story here and WaveMaker will have something to say here soon as well!

icloud have been designed to be a rapid web-based 4GL development tool, where the database is provided as a virtual file system, capable of storing documents, binaries and generating meta data as Atom feeds. Instead of a table, use a folder, instead of creating a row in the table; create a document. Indexing and fast retrieval is provided by icloud. Think of it as a Lotus Notes, but were applications are described in XML and the database is a repository.

At the core of icloud is an XML Virtual Machine, executing the applications directly on the client, without doing any server round-trips. This improves the responsiveness of "web" applications in icloud. Applications look and much more like desktop software.

We are working on icloud’s virtual machine for more devices than the web browser. This means that any application written for icloud will work online, and elsewhere…

icloud Beta Team