Nigel,

N> It was recently suggested by someone that a GUI be shipped with Firebird
N> that could run on all platforms.

not very recently. It appears it's quite a frequently asked question
since Firebird came to existence. And it was asked mostly by Windows
people.

N> While we all know there's a plethora of them, it would be nice if you could
N> point your browser at a port, and it answered.

Yes that would be nice, although the setup (start a service/demon,
open a port on the firewall, etc.) perhaps is more complex than the
average GUI admin application will expect. Plus, there are things that
you simply can't do with a web interface with the same ease as with a
native GUI interface, like displaying an interactive tree of objects,
opening several object property windows at once, extracting metadata
and DML to script files...

N> (THTTPD would be perfect - http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/)

for one, it doesn't appear to run on Windows; plus, I'm not sure what
its license is.

N> A GUI for querying, table mods, etc

These are quite simple things to do for a native GUI application.
FlameRobin does that, among other things, as do all the
non-cross-platform other GUI apps.

N> A small application server, with control over field layout on forms

This is unclear to me. I'd like more details, although by instinct I
wouldn't mix administration and application services in a single
piece of software.

N> A monitoring system - oldest open transaction, number of connections,
N> diskspace, etc.

Nice.

Ciao
--
Nando Dessena
http://www.flamerobin.org