It is sad that after 20 years of MVC and the 10 years of it on the Web, we are still telling people that to start coding they need to start with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. And I agree with you, this is the place to start today. Yet it is pathetic, that is unless we want to keep the coding just to ourselves, like the doctors do with their field. I recently listened to a presentation on Grails. Honestly wanted to grok it fast. Mind you, I have been a Java developer since it first came out around 1996. No disrespect to the framework itself, but all those extra concepts you need to shove into your head before you even begin to code, this is atrocious.

Out of this resentment I and a couple friends set out to build an MVC system where newbies start with the models (backbone.js) by creating them on a smartphone using only their browser. And once you are done, the app goes live. See it at http://urbien.com and its open sourced client at http://github.com/urbien/urbini

Laying out the main concepts of your future app, and connecting them is not easy for noobs. Hack, even for developers sometimes it is a bit of a puzzle. You need to scratch your head a couple of times when you make the domain model for a new app. But at least this is all you need to do to get the app running with our system.

Afterwards you can start tinkering and tweaking, by changing themes, images, modifying the underlying templates (HTML) in-place, and connecting apps IFTTT-style, with a tiny plug script.

Would you like to review and may be even help us make the design friendly to geeks-who-can't-code?