Doing Templates One Better, Web DB RAD scripts

[Ron Pero <rp...@boone.net>]

Dear All

There are a few scripts out there that allege to make it easy to set up
database administration web pages.

The idea is that a nonprogrammer writes up, in plain but structured text,
specifications for a database or html form. Then a script parses that text,
creates an html form with those fields, SQL statements for insert, update,
select, etc, and even html pages for doing these operations from web pages.
Sounds slick.

Below are links and descriptions of a few programs that do something like
this (taken from
http://www.perl.com/reference/query.cgi?section=database&x=7&y=13 and
elsewhere). I have not tried them -- a couple look quite complicated, in
effect creating an entire new system. Or even uses a new template system,
reinventing the wheel yet again.

So, the question is: has anybody on this list used any of these, or
something better? Anything you recommend?

I know I could use Embperl, Mason, ASP, etc, which have easy ways to
connect to db's. But I'm looking for something even more basic, where
instead of creating html templates, the whole thing starts with The
Simplest Possible Text, and generates the entire application.

WDBI (see below) seems closest to what I am looking for.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

Ron

http://www.wdbi.net
Very interesting

genquery -- Freeware
http://www.odbsoft.com/cook/sources.htm
This package has various functions for generating html code from an SQL
table structure and
for generating SQL statements (Select, Insert, Update, Delete) from an html
form. You can
easily build a complete forms interface to an SQL database (query, add,
update, delete)
without any programming! 

DBIx::HTMLView -- Module
http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/id/H/HA/HAKANARDO/
A general purpose module to simplify the creation of web userinterfaces to
a DBI database,
currently it can list, view, add, edit and delete entries in the databse
using either <input ...> or <textarea> to gather the info. 

WODA -- Freeware 
http://www.fagg.uni-lj.si/~zturk/works/wb/
A Web Oriented DAtabase development system -- WODA is about 180k of code in
Perl
language which makes it very easy to create a multimedia, web-oriented,
semi-relational
database that can then be maintained, added-to, modified, and queried
through the WWW.