Pete,
I agree with you about websites containing lots of complex logic. It
is an interesting excercise to extract out this logic from the day to
day business of web app development. In any case, as I think more
about various if/else claues or business specific computations, I get
even more convinced that either many of our daily routines can be
abstracted away, or partitioned (I guess the way the MVC model keeps
people like me from putting everything together in a complex mess).
It is interesting that much of the software packages specifically
marketed for 'business logic' (various rules engines) are, at their
most fundamental, not very different from relational DBs.
I am also fairly certain that whole programming languages (their
semantics and their syntax) can be defined within relational DBs.
So why not attempt to use databases as more than just data stores?
P.S. I actually don't think the kind of framework I am looking for
exists (oracle has html db, but I haven't been able to study it yet).
And I should add that I realize theoretical Relational Dbs are
different from modern implementations, but we still have a base to work
on.