What RAD tools are out there? [closed]

Answer 1

REALbasic's a RAD tool tool - its compiler produces native executables. And it's a cross-compiler as well, which means you can build from any platform for any platform.

Full database access is only supported in the Professional Edition (at EUR 400). The personal version comes at EUR 75 and can connect to REALSQLDatabase (which also from the RealSoft guys).

Unlike with Hibernate or SQLAlchemy, you must write the DB layer yourself.

Answer 2

Lazarus LCL is a Delphi like VCL over existing widget sets.

It can be GTK1, GTK2, QT, Win32/64, WinCE and Carbon. There are others (like a COCOA bridge) but those are mostly only in their initial stages.

Answer 3

Visual DataFlex is a great RAD tool that we use. It's specifically target at creating database driven business applications. It's unfortunately not free, but it is a great environment/language and Data Access gives good support.

Answer 4

Oracle Application Express (http://htmldb.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=4600:6:171781307324519::NO::::)

Using only a Web browser and limited programming experience you can develop data centric applications in minutes. Browser-based development enables you to develop applications on most computers using only a modern Web browser.

Use simple wizards and declarative programming to create powerful reporting and data entry applications. You can create applications from spreadsheet uploads, or on existing database tables and views. Oracle Application Express includes SQL Workshop to create and manage the database objects that support your application.

With Application Express, coding is declarative. That means that no code is generated or compiled. You interact with wizards and property sheets. Since the SQL language is used to define reports and charts, some knowledge of SQL is helpful. If procedural logic is needed, you can write snippets of code using PL/SQL. Declarative code yields fewer differences between developers and this consistency makes Application Express applications easy to maintain and manage.

Answer 5

Magic uniPaas: used it at my very first job to develop GUI's. It's a no nonsense RAD Tool, where everything is table based. It also provides a runtime environment. Back then it was called Magic eDeveloper.

Answer 6

Enthought Traits is a great framework to build a default UI from a model. Easy to use, powerful, the default case is the one you want most of the time and it does what you expect

But there is no database persistence. In fact, no persistence at all. You have to write the code to save/load your model yourself. Doing that for XML is pretty simple (there is an abstract API which works for any object in your model), so you just need to write one class with, say, 50 lines of code, no matter how complex your model is.

The UI controls are not easy to extend, so if you need something which doesn't come with it, good luck.

The model mentioned above can be implemented in under one hour, another hour to read/write it from/to XML. The graph navigation for the relation will take a couple of days using the canvas widget from Qt.