I don't typically post on a non-technical topic, but recently I started looking at
Visual WebGUI and I was really impressed.
In essence it provides a Windows Forms design time interface for building web applications. The user experience and developer experience very very closely matches that of a traditional Windows Forms application, but the content is delivered as web code which seems from the little testing that I have done to at least support IE and FireFox.
The realy cool thing about the framework is that the client updates and events are all driven using ajax to lighten the network traffic. Once the server side code has executed only the required updates are transmitted back to the client and automagically integrated into the client presentation without any assitance or know how from the developer.
The framework seems to have a very friendly licencing model, essentially free unless you want guaranteed support (that's my simplified interpretation). The controls are all open-sourced so you can develop new controls and extend and modify the appeance and functionality of the intial control library.
I would do the framework an injustice to try an explain all the things it achieves, so I would strongly recommend you take a look at it. I would be very interested to hear your opinions on it.
Now I wonder if Microsoft would pick-up on something like this.