My first experience developing DBMS-based apps was with IMS, using COBOL calls to DLI. Later on, I worked with several other products, on a smaller scale, such as: DBASE, INFORMIX 3.3/SQL and ORACLE on DOS, UNIX-XENIX and VAX/VMS platforms. When I was a product planner for AT&T-IS Labs, I had the opportunity to eval several RDBMS-based app development products. Since those days until present, I have not come across a truly decent rapid development (RDS) product which allowed me to quickly generate a prototype and easily customize it to achieve desired functionality. Informix-SQL was one product which came close to achieving this, however some customization required lengthy and cumbersome ESQL/C or re-writing the app with I4GL. Progress RDBMS had good features, but no code generation and was not SQL compatible. I considered Oracle to be functionally rich but lacked RDS capabilites that I've been seeking. It would be great if an RDS app generation product existed which had a combination of all the best features from the currently availble products. Perhaps some day, with so many experienced app developers in this realm, we could design and produce an ideal RDBMS-based RDS!
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4Have you looked at Oracle Application Express for rapid application development?
I had a lot of success with Clarion: http://www.softvelocity.com/
My slant on this is that you are looking to a development model that has, to a large extent, been rejected. Generally the preferred option these days is the separate of the business logic (the application) and the database.
You'd take one of the mainstream languages (Java, dotNet, Python are all reasonable choices for a non-web application). They all have IDEs for faster development, source/version control etc. And they all will talk to pretty much any database platform.
Then just use your database of preference at the back. The database may be a 'heavy' one such as mySQL, Oracle or SQL Server if you are dealing with a multi-user system. Something running standalone on a single machine can use SQLite or BerkelyDB.
Looking at your other posts about the pawnshop application, I think you are overly focusing on the database, which is pretty much a commodity these days. For example, I'm using the Firefox web browser. One of its supporting files is urlclassifier3.sqlite, which has three tables, one of which has over 500,000 records (URLs which it will warn you about if you try to visit them).
CouchDB + couchapp == goodness
You get the separation of concerns, but all hosted out of the same server.