Delphi's data aware components were power tools. It didn't take much longer than building something in Access, but dead easy to plug it into a RDBMS; extremely

Delphi's data aware components were power tools. It didn't take much longer than building something in Access, but dead easy to plug it into a RDBMS; extremely fast to work with; stable, simple to deploy. As I remember, making validation errors pretty was a bit of a chore, but on most of our backend stuff we just showed the SQL error and it usually made sense.