I think the gold standard for this was Visual Basic, especially combined with MS Access. And they didn't touch on File Maker. A lot of those one-person, in-house applications I've come across were wrappers around databases more than anything else. For example, I ported an application that was written on Access and VBA to track counts of organisms in stream beds to the Web for a county government. Frankly, I'm not sure I made their lives better, except for their manager's manager to check a box. And there are a bunch of small applications I've run across for things like property management that are little more than a GUI over a database.