Through-the-Web Web Application Development

Question

I'm particularly fond of the way the following SAAS companies have enabled application development through-the-web. Many of them allow, through-the-web definition of tables, views, relationships, forms, dashboards, email-notifications, charts, calendars, cross-tabulations, and role based security. They are:

• DabbleDB

• Zoho

• TeamDesk

• InfoDome

• Caspio

Other Interesting PAAS

• TIBCOSilver

I've also found these open source products that offer through-the-web application development. These tend to use Javascript components that interface via a REST interface. The Javascripts components can typically be switched into "development" mode and configured to have custom data sources, respond to events, and be styled.

• WaveMaker (Open Source Java)

• SmartGWTPro

• AribaWeb

Are there any other through-the-web application development frameworks? I'm especially looking for the closest thing offered by Ruby or Python?

Answer 1

Depends on what you mean with development.

Zope 2 is the original through-the-web (I'll say TTW from now on) development platform, and has done TTW dev since 1998 or so. It's in Python and is awesome in many ways. The TTW development is not one of those ways. :)

Creating forms and schemas, and editing the workflow etc TTW is a great idea. Calling it development is, well, not so great. :) Zope lets you write Python code. That is real TTW development, and it's a bad idea for many reasons.

• You can't use a proper editor.
• You can't use a debugger.
• You can't use a real version control system.
• etc etc for ever.

Now big, advanced deep configuration TTW, including schemas and workflows, yes. TTW Development, no. Bad idea.

The excellent CMS Plone, which runs on Zope 2, is moving away from TTW development (although it's still possible and supported in Plone 4, just frowned upon), but still allows TTW configaration of large parts, including workflow, forms and with Dexterity (which is it's new content type framework) also content type Schemas.