1. Motivation

In the beggining, there was nothing but Cobol.

This kind of stuff serves well, but of course, you still had to work a lot to get the job done, as it wasn't big deal.

Later, there was those xBase, that combines some interesting features, but the ugly language was not suited for very large projects, and other limitations also raise soon. Those was shipped with some code generators, but the result was limited, and usually you had to drop it and put the fingers in the generated code so you get what you need.

In days I can still consider near, RAD tools appears. Beside the differece between RADs and late 4GLs isn't clear for almost anybody, the goofy-oriented approach "You don't have to code!" rapidly showns what served for. While some ones still saves property data as raw text, amazingly others chose to do it binary, so you can't search, replace or do nearly anything with it.

Anyway, these are tools created to be used in its own way, but I feel that way was thought to impress the customer with a 60 seconds demo. Meanwhile, real worlds projects will suffer because of this. Their generators are too simple, and their database oriented support primitive. Their producers can claim anything about their enterprise class products, but most of the work is still a mess, or at least involves very repetitive tasks. Those tasks could be really easy to do, but you must do them anyway... It's a fact, some crucial part of the process doesn't get better since Cobol days.

I'm tired. So I want a tool that allows to work comfortably. A tool that does most or even all of the obvious job. A tool that don't force me to use the mouse all the time. A tool created with the developer's need in mind. A tool that gives me a lot of freedom, but still saves me a lot of effort. All of this is what I want for Niles.