Building complex web applications is usually a job for developers. But the people who know what needs to get built, are usually not the developers. What if there was an easy way for the "power users" and "subject matter experts" inside an organization to describe everything they know about how the application should be built....and then out pops the application, based on the options and requirements they've described? And then pigs fly?

There is a way, and it's called Formulize, an open source web form and data management toolkit. It works similarly to a content management system (ie: Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, etc.) but instead of managing website content, it manages data structures and database systems. Formulize gives webmasters and other advanced users a broad range of configuration options to describe what data should go into their application, how all the data is related, who can do what with the data, and how the data should be presented on the screen.

In this hands-on workshop, we will use the new streamlined administration interface for Formulize 4, to walk through the process of building a real-world application. No web programming knowledge or SQL/database knowledge is required.

Nonetheless, this approach can be useful for developers too, since it can be faster than custom building systems, and it enforces standardization at the implementation level, so it has the same benefits for database applications that using a CMS has for website content and structures. Formulize can also be integrated with any website/server that runs PHP.