So what is the big lie you should be asking yourself? It is the fact that taking applications from the green screen to the web is easy and/or fast. All of the software vendors sell this. Here are some gleaned from their current web pages.
"...provides a wealth of end-user capabilities allowing the developer to rapidly create feature-rich, high performance applications.."
'Rapid application development for multivalue"
Web development can be fast and easy if you are converting or creating a simple screen. Simple screens it turns out are a significant number of the forms that are done, however, they compromise only 5 to 15 percent of the time of development.
Lets talk about normal forms and where the time is spent. Depending on which tool you use, some of your time is divided in setting up the objects to allow the translation of variables from Universe and Unidata to the web, and designing the form or re-designing the form to fit the web. The rest of you time is either writing the JavaScript to run the custom features you want and modify or writing from scratch the UniBasic subroutine that handles the business logic. For example, business logic might be where we are allowed to buy this dollar amount from this vendor or only these particular products.
The last part of Web development that no brochure or web page talks about is debugging the four headed monster you just created. It is the UniBasic code, JavaScript, HTML, or objects that are causing my form to function unexpectedly. A good rule of thumb is them more complex the form, the more complex the debugging.
Here is the figure you should use on most Web form development. For example, if this form took about 20 hours to develop count on 40 to 60 hours to debug, pass quality assurance, and client approval.
BTW: U2logic's XLr8Developer hardly ever uses the word rapid to describe the web development process. If we do we are speaking of those code file Web entry forms.
