During my early years of programming in the 90s, every application needs to be coded manually and UI is text in appearance, programmers are limited to make UI out from combination of ASCII based characters. There are some attempts to make coding much simplier or at least much faster, one such RAD tool that exist is called Layout, it's the first WYSIWYG studio at that time, that could create true graphical UI and could run from DOS (has it's own graphics engine, and doesn't need windows OS).
Layout was the first 4th generation language at that time. Imagine, you could create an application without a single coding effort, by just creating a flowchart and specifying the flow of the application by connecting lines to each and every box, each box represents a functionality, and the source code will be generated for you in either Basic, C++ or Pascal. This is similar to Windows Workflow Foundation of .NET framework, but less complicated. I created a simple app that I named Food Costing for storing/creating a list of recipies, and computes capital and retail cost in no time, even converted a Clipper based IT Applicant Exam in just 2 days. There was one another contender called Magic but these didn't last long.
These attempt to make programming much simplier and easier have never ceased to exist, as there's a need to balance a compromise between time and business need. The businesses needs applications to be up and running in no time. With todays technology, programming aspect have never matured, only the approach by adopting patterns of object oriented programming (or some coupled with aspect oriented programming) as compared to the traditional procedural programming (which still exist on all programming languages to support developers who have never embraced OOP yet). OOP is good as it hides the complexity of each functionality thru abstraction, but too much abstraction complicates OOP and adds overhead, in short it failed to address the need to create applications in no time.
There are so many RAD tools available nowadays in the market to cut development time in half. One such tool worth mentioning is called CodeCharge Studio (from yessoftware.com), it generates code for you in PHP, ASP.NET - C#/VB, Perl, ColdFusion, Java/JSP, and supports majority of SQL database. One beauty of it is you can choose different theme/layout for different types of web applications, and if you're not happy, you can create theme from Artisteer (from artisteer.com) and use it instead.
Half of the save time allows you to customize how pages fit together, you still have to code yourself but at least it saves you from common initial development effort of creating Datagrids CRUD, paging, menus and the like. It has ready made template/framework that would work out of the box for applications like Community Portal , Online Store, Task Management System, Employee Directory, Bug Tracker and Forum / Message Board.
This is not a replacement for programmers/developers, but rather a tool to buy and save time.
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