Caspio is all about "no more programming for custom web applications." Last week I took a Web meeting with Caspio Founder and CEO Frank Zamani. I hate Web meetings, and almost always try to decline. I especially hate Web meetings where the presenter assumes that I know nothing, instead of taking two minutes to look up my biography, or asking me. I hate it even more when the presenter makes sure to lard up every sentence with the name of the product.I suppose it was really my own fault for having covered Caspio’s competitor LongJump. In fact, the only reason I agreed to cover LongJump is that they were starting to offer an API, SDK, and an Eclipse plug-in, since they had discovered that a Web-based GUI could only get their clients 80% of the way to a finished application.Caspio doesn’t seem to have gone that route: they’re all about “no more programming for custom web applications.” They should really say “no more text-based programming,” because what you’re really doing with all of Caspio Bridge’s wizards is programming, or at least a simplified take on programming. They also do some surprisingly sophisticated things, such as geographical searches, CAPTCHA pages, map integration, localization, and dynamic cascading drop-down lists populated through Ajax calls, all available without making you (or allowing you) to write any code. I’m sure that many of you will take one look at Caspio and sneer. I’m also sure that some of you are in companies with business people who would like to get a simple data-based application up and integrated into their site, but can’t get onto IT’s radar, and they’re the people that Caspio is targeting. For that audience, this is actually quite an impressive product.The company’s other selling point is that they price by the data page rather than by the user, and today they’ve announced that they’re upping the limits on each tier. The pricing starts at $39.95/month for 10 pages, according to this pricing page.And now I’m going back to Visual Studio to hack some C++. I have a COM interface that I need to port from one ATL ActiveX control to another, and I need to make sure that the Unicode Win32 API calls used will work when compiled for ANSI strings, and that the performance counters are being normalized correctly. That’s traditional development. But configuring Caspio is development, too. Software Development