>>>> Rube Goldberg contraption, right? ;-) The KISS 4GL proposition is so unrealistic in 2015 that you'd have to question whether products like VFP ever really existed if you listen to some people. ;-) Meanwhile back in the jungle, we still use RVs created in a few minutes during the VFP beta in 1995.

To learn Web-API I'm doing a simple Web-API/ASP.NET CRUD app for training purposes now.
Rube Goldberg would be envious of this mess.
In a two-table, one page app tutorial, I've used the following:

VS-IDE
C#
LINQ
SQL-Server
Razor
Html
CSS
JSON
Ajax
Web-API
ASP
MVC
Entity Framework
Code First
Scaffolding
Nu-get
Git-Hub
Package Console Manager
JavaScript
Jquery
Knockout
MVVM
Bootstrap
Modernizr

To make things really interesting, there are versions of some of these that conflict with earlier versions of some of the others.
What's really annoying Is the knowledge that many of these technologies will be obsolete a few years hence.

And so we beat on, boats against the current...