In my quest to stop abusing Excel for database tasks, I returned to the world of web development. I remember studying web development for a while before I came across the term "CRUD app". Though I might have encountered it even earlier and thought it was derogatory insult instead of a descriptive acronym: Create, Read, Update, and Delete. These four operations neatly encapsulates all fundamental functionality of a productive application (and even some entertainment ones, too.) This set of data manipulation activities drove HTML design from the very start: HTML <form> exist to enter and update data, and HTML <table> exist to present data.

Corresponding to those fundamental HTML 1.0 concepts were server-side mechanism that started with the Common Gateway Interface. Server-side infrastructure has evolved since their beginning, just as browsers have. By the time I started my web development education I had the luxury of platforms like Ruby on Rails. Which offered a "scaffolding" mechanism to automatically generate CRUD infrastructure so I didn't have to write my own from scratch. Other development platforms offer similar counterparts, but that's not the only way to go. I have since come across many more options for building a CRUD web app.

The simplest and easiest way into this world is Google Forms (and its competitors). I frequently encounter it for surveys, registration, etc. Which meant I always see the "Create" side of the app, though some forms allow me to return and "Update" my data. Whoever created the Google Form can then "Read" submitted responses and "Delete" if needed. Google Forms make creating a CRUD web app as easy as creating a Google Doc, and with better control over data than sharing a spreadsheet and telling people to add their data to a row.

I want to learn something quick and easy to use so I can use a database when it's the right tool for the job. Minimize the hurdle of getting over the "ugh, I don't want to spin up a database" hump. Google Form is a very simple way to go, but it goes too far: the data is output to a spreadsheet (Google Sheets) instead of a database perpetuating the "Excel is not a database" legacy. So I went looking for something between super simple Google Forms and full web development platforms like Ruby on Rails.

What I found are products that advertise themselves as "no-code" or "low-code" web app tools. The first one I came across was Amazon's Honeycode under their AWS umbrella, but that has since been shut down. (I was going to link to the shutdown announcement, but it was posted to the Honeycode site, which is now dead.) Keenly reminded of the perils of putting my data into an online service, I focused on solutions I could run at home and found Budibase as a promising candidate.