Rapid application development tools

Rapid application development tools are great. Visual Basic, Delphi, etc. are great at cutting development time for complex applications through their use of reusable components.

Reusable components (I will refer to them as "controls" from here on) are simply pre-built pieces of programming code designed to perform a specific function. When designing an application in a visual environment, controls can be quickly dropped into the design, and modified to fit the task at hand. Most of the controls you'll find are designed to handle such tasks as pushbuttons, menus, text labels, and so forth. As a developer, you only need to write code to "glue" them into your application, and develop the interactions between controls.