Forms should be apps: Why I'm building Component

I started my career in the early 90s as a Lotus Notes developer. People have a deep hatred for it because of its email integration, but ignore that bit. The underlying technology was amazing and the ability of power users to create incredibly useful forms apps really has never been replicated since the web and cloud took over intranets.

Here's how it would work: A big corporation like BellSouth or Coca-cola would drop Notes into various groups because of some corporate-wide apps they wanted them to use. Then an intern or a geeky office worker would start tinkering - or maybe even had gone to an on-site training seminar - and begin whipping up little databases to keep track of this and that for their team. These would inevitably end up being essential tools for running the business. The consulting company I worked for would get called in to help as the group reached their technical limits, but it was amazing to see how far they had progressed without a single developer. That was such a fun job because you'd come in and solve niggling issues which the group had just been living with for months or years. They'd think you were a genius for simply knowing about an @function that had eluded them. After you wrote some script to export the data into reports or spreadsheets that used to take hours to be done by hand? You were considered a god. I've never felt so appreciated as a developer as I did in those days.

Access, FoxPro, dBase and other forms-based databases like this had similar effects, but the network-oriented, bottom-up Notes apps were the ones that were incredibly useful instantly and as a result, would spread like viruses throughout companies. (Systems admins generally despised the lack of centralized control, and fighting with them to give access and turn on functionality was a regular part of the job.)

To my knowledge, this has never really been duplicated - though many apps and services have attempted it - simply because of the limitations of web-based interfaces. Now that reactive web apps have finally enabled full on, no compromise GUIs, the time for forms apps might come again.