This reminds me of Oracle Forms: It was by today's standards simple, cheap (overall), facilitated compact code that mirrored close to biz logic, and easy to dep

This reminds me of Oracle Forms: It was by today's standards simple, cheap (overall), facilitated compact code that mirrored close to biz logic, and easy to deploy. It used a kind of "GUI browser" so you didn't have to install executables to use and update apps, just one "browser". But Oracle rewrote the client into Java, and Java's deployment flaws dogged it, so co's had to gradually abandon it. They should have kept it in C. (The developer's side stayed mostly the same, it was deployment's side that got the headaches.) It wasn't esthetic, but got most CRUD jobs done quick and simple. I've never coded in it myself for production, but observed amazing productivity at multiple orgs. There's something magic about it. Oracle originally had to cater to many OS's, so were parsimonious with GUI features. Thus, it has just enough to do typical CRUD jobs but not enough to distract, confuse, and over-complicate the tool. They didn't get feature-happy over time. Once you learned how to milk existing features, you realized you really didn't need boatloads of pluggins. Current web stacks are bloated nightmares and business money sinks in comparison. I'm not saying bring back Oracle Forms as-is, but at least borrow its best lessons. We'd have more practical GUI web standards by now. (Most CRUD productivity don't need mobile UI's. Also, it may not do well for big "enterprise" apps, but for small and niche it groves.)