true, but if you compare the same simple crud app to a desktop equivalent - which is easier?  to get even the simple web app to the stage that it runs consistently on all the different browsers out there is a bigger task.  say you want to list the rows from your db: do you use a table? or divs? lots of ways to layout these in html.  then you need to write some CSS, cause there's no default look and feel provided out of the box.  then you'll probably need to write some javascript to validate fields before user can submit a form (or alternatively come up with error-handling on the server-side and then write some html to display these appropriately).<p>so many different technologies involved.  IMO a programmer shouldn't be expected to know java, css, xhtml, javascript - just to get a crud app running.<p>I've been developing web apps for many years and to this day some css layout issue takes me hours to solve to get IE6 to work properly.  That's where time is wasted, not on the crud db access stuff...