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Comment by BatFastard | Hacker News Reader

I hate to be the guy who say back in my day... but back in the 90's there was a tool by Borland (anyone remember them?) who created a no-code, low-code tool called Delphi. It was awesome, I used it on a few front end projects and it active data source tools made laying out complex UI's so painless. Of course this was back before Rest APIs and the internet for most part. But it kicked some serious ass.

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Speaking as a once professional Delphi programmer, I can assure you that Delphi programs have lots of textual code in them. The IDE generates empty functions for event handlers, but you have to write textual code to do the actual handling.

If I recall correctly, it's the same as dropping UI components in Visual Studio and then assigning methods to events.

You could theoretically create a database editor without any code. Drop a database connection component, connect a datasource to it (which defines table name), create a "scrollable box" and drop a text edit for every field, drop a few buttons and give them special functions like "save" and "cancel", and you should have an approximation of Microsoft Access form, but compileable to standalone binary.

I don't think anyone ever made projects purely in GUI though, there is always a need for some custom code to be written.

Unless I have stumbled across something different it appears as if this is still being developed. I have no idea if what I have linked is even remotely close to what you remember it being.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Delphi_(software)

This was my first exposure to development when I got my first PC. Delphi was amazing for creating User interfaces,as those were the days were 99% of windows apps looked the same ( except Winamp). I even managed to create some useful programs for myself. Shame I dropped it and moved on to 3D modeling for a bit and only returned to development more than a decade later. Who knows what would have happened if I haven't dropped it then..

Delphi still exists: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

And https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Delphi was a RAD environment (gui builder and component property editor) with pascal as a business logic impl language

Visual BASIC is even older than Delphi and was the benchmark for low/no code app development. We called them RAD tools, "rapid application development". If you really wanna go back, hypercard on Macintosh was kinda the original that inspired them all (and even inspired the web we have today).

There’s also Clarion, whose platform is intended to generate code for you and you input your own custom programming and business logic if needed for a basic B2B CRUD desktop app.

I guess like history, SW dev trends also rhyme.

I found Jetbeans was somewhat similar, about 15 years later.

Jetbrains or netbeans?

Netbeans, sorry. Clearly, I have not worked with this tools in ages, either. Basicall netbeans allows you to draw GUI-apps, and the IDE will insert a bunch of boilerprlate java-code that will create those GUI interfaces -- similar to Delphi.

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