Thirty years ago, when I began to design and develop CRUD business applications, I envisioned that as time moved on, designing, prototyping and customizing business applications would become easier and more streamlined. In 1983, I discovered a simple, easy-to-use RDBMS called INFORMIX which enabled me to quickly define schemas, generate default, character-based CRUD forms and reports which could be quickly and easily customized to get an app up and running in a very short timeframe. When GUI front-ends and OOP langs started to make their appearance, I was under the impression that developing apps was going to be even faster and effortless, but to my disappointment, it has become more complex and time-consuming! What can be accomplished with one 4GL instruction can take several hundred lines of code with OOPL's. I have looked at several development environments and tools within the sea of products currently out there and have not been able to find a good Windows/GUI-based 4GL product which can quickly generate default screens and reports where I can then customize into a final product without it taking a long time to accomplish. I recently eval'd 4J's Genero Development Suite where I even encountered bugs/obstacles in getting the demo's to work!.. It feels like everything got more time-consuming and complicated when it was supposed to be the other way around!..
Does an easy-to-use, GUI/RDBMS-based rapid development system exist out there which can provide me a simple/fast way for developing CRUD apps?
Filemaker will likely provide you with everything you've asked for here. It's easy to use, cost effective. http://www.filemaker.com and you can download a 30 day trial there as well.
There are a lot of people who will give FM grief, but the most recent version is a very solid product. Works on Windows and Mac. Good luck.