A few decades ago, a new programming environment exploded: the web. Looking for a ridiculously useful tech stack? Look no further: HTML, HTTP architecture, SQL backend... a guide written at the time:
Paul Graham also wrote about why the web was such a deal, IIRC in the Beating the Averages essay. In particular: you can use whatever tools you want and avoid deploying to client machines.
This reminds me of how we used to create thick client desktop software, connecting directly to the database. Doing most of our business logic on the front end and leaning on the database for auth, relational constraint enforcement and (via stored procedures) transactional consistency and validation. It felt weird at the time when the whole world seemed to move to a three layer model with app servers sitting in the middle - now it's hard to imagine it any other way.
indeed if your app is about managing your personal dvd collection, or variants thereof, such anemic UI-to-database tools work very well. Not when there is complicated domain logic involved.
http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/
Paul Graham also wrote about why the web was such a deal, IIRC in the Beating the Averages essay. In particular: you can use whatever tools you want and avoid deploying to client machines.