It was originally written as an in-house tool designed to speed up development projects. However, Leeds-based data management system creator Symbiant has turned easyGen into a commercial application that puts the individual back into the website building business.

This dynamic script creator enables anyone with a basic understanding of web design to build dynamic, database-driven sites in ASP or PHP with a system of menus and wizards. It isn't just designed to provide your website with the ability to read and write to databases. In fact, it's more than that. easyGen 2 empowers you to create databases without knowing anything about how they actually work.

Using Access or SQLserver with ASP or MySQL with PHP, it's both powerful and remarkably easy to pick up. If you're used to a steep learning curve, such as with DreamWeaver, prepare to be amazed. As you would hope, if you're proficient with DreamWeaver or FrontPage, you can use these apps as external editors.

The main interface is split into a page editor window, a project explorer and a properties inspector and action builder. The latter powers easyGen; adding actions define the functionality of the web application with a mouse click or two. Once listed (they're run from the top down), its easy enough to order them in any way you like, or add conditional actions to act upon them. Assigning dynamic values to page elements is just as simple, as it's a matter of right-clicking and selecting the appropriate menu option. This mix of functionality and power is spread evenly throughout the software.

Take the data source manager, which enables you to easily connect to and build data sources, making use of the generic ASP and PHP connectors supplied, and import the database schema to build the dynamic pages from its content. If you build a project in ASP and later need to have it on a UNIX platform, just change the settings and re-export it.

This truly is an incredibly powerful piece of software.