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by Mister_Snuggles 453 days ago
I would love something like Delphi/VB6, but made for web development.

My day job involves working with PeopleTools, which basically does this. Draw forms (and build all of the supporting objects), save them, and they're accessible through a web browser. You don't need to know HTML, CSS, JS, etc (though it can help), and you can knock out a very based CRUD form in no time without writing any code.

I think the Microsoft Power Platform has features similar to this as well.

But neither of these options are very accessible to regular folks. Something that has the ease of development of Delphi, the deployment simplicity that comes with presenting the application via a web browser, and is accessible to regular folks would be incredible.

2 comments

Xojo Web aims to do exactly what you describe.

https://xojo.com/products/web.php

I haven't really used it - I'm just a hobbyist coder who enjoys the VB6 style development of the desktop version of Xojo.

Wow, a quick cruise through the documentation suggests that this is EXACTLY the kind of thing I'm looking for!

I find myself waffling between "This is too expensive for me to play around with at home" and "Considering what this does, $399 really isn't that bad..."

There is a free trial or a $100 personal use version or some such, at least there was, when I checked it out a while ago.
There's a $100 one for making desktop apps with SQLite support, which doesn't interest me. $399 gets you to the Web tier with PostgreSQL support, which is the feature set I'm most interested in.

I'm still tempted...

There was Delphi for PHP
Is https://delphi.fandom.com/wiki/Delphi_for_PHP the one you're thinking of?

This is truly interesting, and the description on that wiki page suggests that it might be exactly what I'm looking for, but it seems like any concrete information about it has vanished.

Its a very old product, and afaik it was discontinued (many) years ago. It was reasonable for crud applications, nowadays you can do rougly the same with any oss airtable clone. Could have been a great tool, but unfortunely poor marketing and lack of vision killed the product.