Yes - don't design your application in a way that sucks.

You're thinking as a DBA / programmer, not as a systems analyst. Think about how your application is going to be used. CGI::Application (and similar frameworks) provide user-level mapping to business-level concepts. I had an application that would CRUD over 40 tables. But, because there were only 7 different screens (with options), I had 7 runmodes. Now, based on those options, different things would happen.

Here's another way to look at it - to run reports, I need 2 runmodes - PickReport() and RunReport(). However, I will probably want:

• A class for each report
• One or more base classes for those reports
• A class for each parameter
• One or more base classes for those parameters
• One or more templates for each report (We had 3 - HTML, PDF, and XLS)
• Internationalization support
• Database layering
• Images for look'n'feel

In total, I think we ended up with some 250 files supporting 70 reports. Still only 2 runmodes, though ...