>>Why ?
>
>Years ago, I heard of a team who spent four years playing with that tool and got a nearly functional first set of forms. The estimate was that just a couple more years were needed to get most of the app ready for a beta.

When I was working for the government there was a lot of Oracle in use. Back then the government liked to use business solutions from a variety of technologies until one was proven to really stand out from the rest. Before windows on every pc, in fact before every user had a pc, there were Unix servers and terminals. The effect was that I had to learn Oracle, Sql Server, Unix, Windows, VB, VFP, and a variety of others. I even wrote apps on Foxbase for Unix. The good thing was that the government spent the money to train.

In my experience, Oracle was more robust and more reliable than anything else I worked with. Perhaps most people don't recall the flimsy first versions of SQL Server. Or they didn't notice the problems if they nevered worked with Oracle. As to developing forms though, they were simple enough for simple forms. When you moved into the realm of complicated forms then it fell short and you were always finding work arounds to get around its limitations. New capabilities were always being promised in the next version. The next version invariably broke your stuff. This is now some time ago though so I don't feel qualified to make any judgment with today's versions. Back then the only support was Oracle - there was nothing else and you had to pay for it. Oracle loved secrecy about its product. It was almost as though they didn't want anyone to know when someone found a problem and would help them privately to keep it private. Having written all that, the backend was so robust that I think the govt made a big mistake when they focused on SQL Server because of the huge $ incentive MSFT provided to do so. The govt used the justification of 'standardization' but they were really making a business deal.