Nearly all our work is "by hand" with some excellent in-house frameworks. However, these are for ERP-style applications and are (sometimes too) complex. Working with more business-critical applications, one focuses on function and not pleasantry.
We have a need to bring up some non-trivial "external-facing" data entry forms. There will likely be several+ hundred various form workflows. (e.g. customer, product, store, &c).
Is there a web simple framework where one can define forms in a database table (e.g. field_name, field_length, field_type, &c) and have said framework manage the type validation, date via calendar, POST/GET of the web form records back into the DB for upsert?
Basically a table-driven forms framework?
Would love to have the designers style it with CSS, but low on priority just now.
This seems so 1996/CGI-ish but why can't I find anything like this? Any recommendations for this requirements? We don't need advanced caching and OO mapping, and a lot of that other jazz. PHP | JSP | CGI is fine.
I've done multiple data entry and reporting applications by extending the Django admin application which works in this fashion. Work is mostly declaring tables (models), validation, columns, columns to search/sort/filter by and display etc and you can glue on more complex logic if you want, but you may hit a wall if you are unfamiliar with more advanced aspects of the framework. If you don't mind python, web2py and turbogears2 have similar devices.