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Comment by cadr | Hacker News Reader

I think there is a lot further someone could take #3 (crud apps for business). While django/rails are great, I think you could build some more specific tools that would provide a lot more leverage in some cases. (Maybe something like DabbleDB but with some more specifics built in.)

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I think #3 very quickly very quickly merges with #2. Specialized crud applications start to look a lot like CMS's with well defined content.

I am working on such an app, over Google App Engine.. http://creator.ifreetools.com

Sample walk-through :: Building a Store Locator type Google Maps app over GAE, using iFreeTools : http://blogs.ifreetools.com/2010/11/building-store-locator-t...

Like http://www.appignite.com/ ?

Maybe? I don't know - the linked page doesn't really have any information.

Like what cases?

Both frameworks support plugins you know.

Sure, but do you really want to mess with low level things like html (or even haml, etc) when all you care about is business logic?

Not saying you are wrong, just saying I think there is room in that space for some innovation.

There are a couple of CMS modules for Django. For Rails there are a couple of good open-source shopping carts that you can customize (quite nicely actually, if you know Rails, since all Rails projects have a standard layout). And I think such projects will migrate to being plugins (which are fairly new in Rails).

Sure, HTML editing is still required and can be painful, but it is an effective way of branding the final result. I think clickety-click interfaces where you modify the interface through various selections / drag-n-dropping are seriously flawed.

Yes, MS Office is a nice example of what a WYSIWYG interface can do, but that's just for standard documents. As soon as you want to get creative in Word, you'll feel the pain and start wishing for HTML.

Besides ... design, other than replacing a logo / playing with colors / choosing a layout from a predefined set, should be left to people that know what they are doing and there is no way around that, because IMHO the hard part is not the HTML language itself, which is included nowadays in high-school curriculum.

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