I am familiar using the Notebook interface interactively for myself to write programs, and graph and display results various forms (e.g., in lists, Grid, DataSets, various plots types, Panel, StringForm etc.). It is easy, fun and I have learn much about Mathematica during the last year.

I now want to write a simple application (a prototype, but one that I will show others), on my desktop (PC or MAC), which "hides the code" and gets all user input to the application via user dialogs using the various built-in dialog related functions. The ultimate intention is to create a web-based application, one that may ultimately get deployed on the Wolfram Cloud to support several dozen concurrent users (users that know nothing about Mathematica), after some further RE-DESIGH for the web deployment.

CDF is not adequate.

My questions are:

1.) To build the desktop prototype of the application, must I create a "Package", or is there a simpler way to display the results of calculations (text and numbers in tables and graphs), into a "user-facing" Notebook different from the Notebook in which the code resides?

(I looked using the Low-Level Notebook Programming routines, e.g., NotebookWrite, while it can be made to work for these purposes, it seems overly complex, having to nest some Grid formatted data inside of things like:

NotebookWrite[nb5, Cell[BoxData[ToBoxes[somegriddata]], "Output"]]

, but I can do it that way, I think, if I have to).

2.) Am I crazy to even thing about approaching my prototyping effort this way, if ultimately I want a multi-user web-based application?
(But I am concerned that the Wolfram tools available for data display and user dialog in the Wolfram Cloud are much too limiting (e.g., FormFunction, is about all I have found for input from the user), to make a good web app.

NOTE: At age 64, and only an amateur programmer, I am woefully not familiar enough with using all the modern Web-based application programming environments based Java Script, Python, HTML5 etc. and their required IDEs. Otherwise I would not be even thinking about using Mathematica for this application, since it is not computationally intensive/complex.

Thank you in advance for any thoughts you might have on these matters. - Rick