Recommend visually appealing table-driven web forms management framework?

Question

Nearly all our work is "by hand" with some excellent in-house frameworks. However, these are for ERP-style applications and are (sometimes too) complex. Working with more business-critical applications, one focuses on function and not pleasantry.

We have a need to bring up some non-trivial "external-facing" data entry forms. There will likely be several+ hundred various form workflows. (e.g. customer, product, store, &c).

Is there a web simple framework where one can define forms in a database table (e.g. field_name, field_length, field_type, &c) and have said framework manage the type validation, date via calendar, POST/GET of the web form records back into the DB for upsert?

Basically a table-driven forms framework?

Would love to have the designers style it with CSS, but low on priority just now.

This seems so 1996/CGI-ish but why can't I find anything like this? Any recommendations for this requirements? We don't need advanced caching and OO mapping, and a lot of that other jazz. PHP | JSP | CGI is fine.

Answer 1

I've done multiple data entry and reporting applications by extending the Django admin application which works in this fashion. Work is mostly declaring tables (models), validation, columns, columns to search/sort/filter by and display etc and you can glue on more complex logic if you want, but you may hit a wall if you are unfamiliar with more advanced aspects of the framework. If you don't mind python, web2py and turbogears2 have similar devices.