Charles Simonyi, creator of Microsoft Office, is up to some really interesting stuff.

I guess his work predates the growth in popularity of the web, but I find it odd that so much of his effort is placed on building out desktop apps.

Admittedly, as a major webapp developer, I’m a bit biased here. I know that there are a lot of corporations still building out massive Java apps, some of which may only have a thin layer that resides on the web.

Here’s an Idea: WYSIWYG Web Development, Entirely From Within Your Browser

I had this idea a while back — pretty sure several others did as well.

The problem with the idea, which I’ll just state up front here, is that programmers would not actually use this tool, since it is entirely designed for non-programmers.

So these kinds of projects seem like they do not get as much love, as say, Ruby on Rails, which is built by programmers for programmers. (Improvements to RoR help rails coders with their daily programming life, not just some mythical would-be end user)

Anyway, the idea is basically a TextMate for the web + schema / migration builder & manager + Rails app management console (deploy | start | restart | stop | etc).

Everything would be web-based, eliminating the need for desktop-based text editors, consoles to create Rails migrations, Subversion clients (versioning would be baked into the app creator / manager by default), etc.

You wouldn’t necessarily need to build something like this on top of Rails, but it could sure make things easier.

Now, *I* wouldn’t use something like this (necessarily), but there are 50 million people out there still on Windows 98, and another few million who think programming in Visual Basic is the cats meow.

Your target market for something like this would be people like my girlfriend (hi Abygale). People who aren’t too techie, but who at least know how to get around a web browser, and are at least familiar with Firefox, etc.

If Abygale could build a simple CRUD application that say, manages a single data model (New Home Builds, for example, since she works in real estate, with just basic metadata for each Home object/database table) entirely from a web-browser, leveraging Rails scaffolding and some sexy default themes for the webapp, well, I think that’d be pretty slick.

Beyond Simple CRUD

Now, sure, going beyond CRUD operations would be tricky for a novice, non-programmer. But if you’ve ever played with Visual Basic, or Flash, you know that once you peel back the UI to poke around in the code, the way things are structured makes it a nightmare to get things done.

Is this code really that hard to read?

def show
  @home = Home.find(params[:id])
end

Ok - the “params” thing is a bit of magic that will need to be grok’d by non-geeks. But other than that, the line should make perfect sense once you learn a few basic rules, i.e. what the @ sign means, etc. This is all thanks to the magic of the Rails’ DSL, and naming conventions when scaffolding out code.

So, this system would not try to reinvent the wheel, simply put everything in a web-browser and require learning some basic web coding skills in the process.

And, I know this is doable. But, will it ever happen? That remains to be seen.