>> is anybody in the business to recommend a RAD tool for creating
>> database-driven web applications without having to much
>> language-specific knowledge, e.g. hand-coding stuff with PHP etc.
>> from scratch?

Ah, so you want the 'holy grail' of software development for web
apps.... A worthy question, young Sir Developer!

Here's the problem, and why I have doubts on your success though. I've
been a web developer for about 14 years, but a PC software developer for
about 15 yrs before that too, and I too had the same immediate question.

But the issue is that web development is nowhere near as predictable or
mature as PC software development. Whereas PC development is focused
around a relatively static platform target (ie. x86 on operating systems
that typically are compatible from one to another - Win95->Win98->WinXP,
etc.), web development is far less mature, and changes with the wind.

There isn't one technology that you have to master - there are handfuls.
For one RAD tool to deal with all of them is a big ask.

For example, a savvy web developer needs to know:

Client Side
-----------
HTML
CSS
Javascript
Graphic rendering
Flash
Video Encoding
SEO
AJAX/JSON

Server Side
-----------
Back-end language of choice (ie. PHP, Ruby, Perl, ASP, Java)
Back-end platform of choice (ie. Linux, Windows)
Back-end database of choice (ie. Firebird, MySQL, etc.)
SOAP/REST/XML


So far your RAD tool has to master all of this to be of value to you.

Your focus appears to be around PHP development, but if you look at the
list it is one of a dozen technologies involved (in my example).

Here's the biggest issue I predict you will face. Your web applications
have a short lifespan before being re-developed to be 'current'. In
order to do this, you will probably consume other open source
technologies into your system. For example, you may wish to use someone
else's CMS, or someone else's eCommerce product. Or you have to
integrate with PayPal, or you have to talk to Twitter, or you have to
integrate with Facebook, etc. You won't want to write all of this
yourself, so you'll go out to the open source market to find those
solutions and you'll find that each is an island unto itself and
integrating with it won't fit into your RAD toolset's philosphy, and
then you'll find the RAD toolset creates more work for you to integrate
this into your app than it would have been to handcode it all. You
might get lucky and find that the RAD development tool has a 'plug-in'
framework for this stuff, but then it assumes that what you want to or
have to integrate with, is supported in that framework.

Trust me, we web developers have been asking for a 'one stop shopping
experience' for writing web apps for years. But the reasons in this
email is why few web developers use a RAD toolset. In fact, if you did
a study of general web developers, the most common thing you'll find
them using is Eclipse as an IDE because it can work with all of these
technologies. But its not WYSIWYG. Maybe Dreamweaver for WYSIWYG
development, but its a poor IDE for coding.

Its at least a good starting point, but the search for the holy grail of
a RAD tool for web development is a worthy adventure. I'm just not sure
if you will find what you are looking for though.

Codegear/Embarcadero (or whatever they are called this week) developed
and released Delphi for PHP a few years ago. I bought it, thinking it
might get close to this. It looked really promising. But trying to
make it actually work was a nightmare. The biggest fail for me was
trying to get it to work with other PHP code. Gave up after about a
month of my life wasted. I'm sure with newer versions, they have gotten
more of the kinks out, but before you delve into this, scour the support
and community forums of the toolset you are looking at and get all
opinions of it from the developers there. If you see more "I'm pulling
my hair out trying to make this work" type postings, then that should
tell you something.

Morfik is promising. But the adoption of it has been slow. I suspect
its hard to break into this market without huge marketing efforts, but
the web is something where if they have something shiny and new that is
promising, it will be heralded quickly. This hasn't been, however. I'm
not exactly sure why, but its probably so different to what the majority
of web developers are already entrenched in, that they are reluctant to
change. But I must give them props - they have stuck at this for a long
time now, and don't seem to be giving up on the quest.

My $0.02 worth (adjust for inflation in your local currency).

Myles
--
-----------------------------
Myles Wakeham
Director of Engineering
Tech Solutions USA LLC
www.techsolusa.com
Phone +1-480-451-7440