The coolest of those tools was written inside Oracle by M. Lonnroth and released into the public domain as WOW. WOW was extremely elegant because it used a small C program to gather up HTML forms and translate them into Oracle Procedure calls. Simple, fast, flexible, and cool.
The only problem with WOW was that it had some pretty severe limitations and a few gross bugs, most of which were fixed by Thomas Dunbar at Virginia Tech's Research Office. Oh, and one horrible bug that kept WOW from accepting input with a ' (single quote) mark in it.
The dredded single quote bug really hurt because I had just written an application with WOW for the University of Missouri-Columbia Office of Research (my day job). This application would blow up whenever you had a single quote mark in one of form the input fields.
About the same time, I was approached by a consulting firm in St. Louis to do some work for a rather large company (who I can't name here). They wanted a web based application that talked to their Oracle database. The WOW approach was the right way to go, but the limitations made it less than suitable.
So, seeing an opportunity knocking at my door, I decided to make a better WOW. I re-wrote the C program as a PRO*C program and did a little enhancement on the PL/SQL package. Of course I did all of this OFF university time.
The program worked, the single quote problem was gone, and I almost got my butt sued because I had released my shareware program as SQLWeb (which by the way is a registered trademark of SQLWeb Technologies, Inc).
I renamed my program MOWI which stands for McAllister Oracle Web Interface. OK not very original, but at least no one else had a web-to-database product with the same name. And, so far I've made exactly $100 off of my shareware fees. That's right, one user registered and paid the shareware fee. The rest of you, shame!
Shortly after MOWI was "released", or maybe it was coincedent with, Oracle came out with Web Server Version 1 and my "edge" was gone. Of course my software cost a lot less; but hey, if you own a copy of Oracle, you're probably not so worried about money. Then Oracle came out with Web Server V2 and started giving away Web Server v1 with Oracle 7.3 and my window of opportunity closed.
Well now there's MOWI Version 2, which is basically the same as Oracle's Webserver v2 except...you get to pick your own web server instead of having to use Oracle's. And, more importantly, MOWI v2 comes as source code so your not stuck with something you can't fix or enhance. Actually, even if I wanted to, I couldn't pre-compile MOWI on all the different platforms supported by Oracle. MOWI Version 2 has been re-written from the ground up using Oracle's OCI libraries. The HTP and HTF packages have also been re-written from scratch and have lots of new comments and useful routines.
And just in time, I hear Oracle is introducing Web Server Version 3, which includes support for various web servers (gee wish I had thought of that [sarcasm]).
The deamon portion of MOWI was written by Jon Ballenger on his Next computer. Jon is an extremely competent programmer who I work with at the university. I wouldn't have gone into deamon mode without him.
The two palm tree design (MOWI Version 2, get it?) was drawn by Kevin Gamble. I fixed his Macintosh Powerbook 170 in exchange for his artistic talents. Kevin also works at the University of Missouri.