Web Application Creation Made Easy Yannis Papakonstantinou, U.C. San Diego Web application development is a tedious programming exercise involving code of multiple languages running at the browser, the application server and the database server. Rapid development frameworks enable applications that are easier to develop and maintain, by streamlining development and eliminating complexities. Do-It-Yourself, custom, database-driven web application platforms go a step further and promise to empower both programmers and non- programmer business process owners to rapidly and cheaply create and evolve applications customized to their organizations' data and process needs. The talk presents UCSD's FORWARD project, which works on an SQL-driven rapid development framework and a Do-It-Yourself platform on top of it. The SQL-driven framework allows a developer to declaratively specify Ajax pages simply by providing minimally extended SQL queries (responsible for data access) and a visual configuration (responsible for rendering the data using Ajax components). The system leverages and extends incremental view maintenance and interoperability research to achieve generality and performance equivalent to hand-optimized Ajax programs. The Do-It-Yourself platform provides an application specification mechanism where the application owner specifies the application by manipulating visible aspects of it or by responding to straightforward configuration questions. It is particularly suitable to the easy creation of forms-driven workflow applications. The talk describes techniques and ongoing work that are based on data-centric workflow research, static analysis of queries and other areas in order to enable a non-programmer to create basic programs, while the platform's algorithms provide semantically meaningful options, guide application specification and help the owner experience the behavior of her application. A first version of the Do-It-Yourself platform has been commercialized by app2you.com.