Why did you have to translate VB app to Java? To enable web? In VB if i wanted to display a database table, even as a newbie, I could do it in 2 minutes. Despite having a decade of experience, I struggle to display a paginated, reactive database table in Java over a week. Not saying Java is bad, but VB was amazing in its time for building desktop business apps and nothing came closer to that (other than other RAD tools).
If the web would be sound tech instead of this steaming pile of... whatever it actually is at this point in time, these kinds of RAD tools would probably now exist for the web and be better for it instead of being forgotten. They weren't perfect and random people created ugly beasts in them, but the process was fast and the results were often good enough.
