Really cool!

From Om’s earlier article, the whole point of these apps is to enable people inside businesses to create the specific kinds of simple web apps they need to process data according to their business rules. I’m exactly that kind of customer. I have an endless supply of CSV outputs from various tools, and constantly need to make interesting views into that disparate data. Right now Excel and Access are the tools of choice, but something like this or DabbleDB give me the power to create simple web views according to business rules, without spending hours pounding on it. A very interesting space.

It will never displace programmers. I know its not the point of it…But thats what most people thinks its there for.

would like to try it out anybody have an extra beta invitation lying around being waiting for this for quite awhile

Ohhh great. More business owners who question development time. ‘Look Coghead can do it. Can’t we roll this out to the enterprise?’

At least this might be the end of Access!

Looks a whole lot like Serius Developer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppWare

I’d love to try it out too. If the coghead devs are following this thread, I’d love to hook it up and review it!

It looks like a glorified CMS system. Why use this when things like Mambo/Joomla exist and do exactly the same thing (and has a far larger audience of users)?

#8. agreed.
You simply don’t need code, that’s all. Doesn’t mean a lot. You still need the forma-mentis of a programmer.
Since this kind of tools typically has severe limitations when you want something beyond the very basic, you also need hacking talent to overcome those limitation.

A couple of observations:

The #1 problem with business applications is that the programmers/developers who write them are so decoupled from the actual business process that they inevitably get it wrong (and even if they are in touch with the business process, that process changes while they’re writing the application).

The #1 problem with business people who hire programmers/developers to automate their business processes is that they have no clue when it comes to structured methods (object oriented programming, databases, useablity, testing, etc.) that allow applications to survive change.

Rigth now the status quo for the business side of the house is the Office suite; this provides the general purpose tool with enough structure to statisify about 95% of what business owners and executers want to do. Unfortunately, the general purpose nature of these tools makes them unsuitable for “application on a cash register” deployment.

These folks are either trying to go after a 5% market or they are trying to create a new market where non existed before… and with any change, I don’t think this is to be feared by developers. If there’s one thing I know, I know this won’t scale well and people left to their own devices will inevitably build an appliction with twisty little passages, all alike… and will need to be bailed out at some critical point in their usage of said application.

I guess the best way to think about this is: visual studio for the suit and tie set.

What is the backend of Coghead?
* Java
* PHP
* ASP.NET
* ?

:D :D

Next one!

Great! When each sales manager and office cleaner will create a business applications I will became a shepard, at last! I’m so sick and tired of such “developers”!

Seems like this will be the base for may SAS ( Software as a service) startups who will go ahead and create their applications on this platform and their sales and marketing effort will spiral the network effect for CogHead.com

Great venture and a superb platform. I am looking forward to developing a
couple of applications on this platform.

People forget things faster in this industry than in any other. They also fail to learn lessons.

This class of application–those which promise to allow “non-developers” to develop (an obvious logical contradiction)–has been around for at least 15 years. To date not one of these products has ever made it possible for anyone to create any but the most basic business applications. People using such tools are either turned off by their complexity, stymied by their limitations, or else they become versed in the tool so that they can become truly productive. Many a former secretary or clerk has learned how to program in VB in order to create simple applications in Access.

The idea that you will get something new and exciting by taking this old idea and putting an HTML interface on it is to be wilfully ignorant of the past. There have been no technological breakthroughs making application development vastly easier, nor is that likely until AI finally comes into its own later in the century.

Now, there’s nothing particularly wrong with these apps, however their success is likely to be much the same as their non-HTML predecessors: limited at best.

Nik wrote:

“Currently there is no web equivalent of either of these apps, but as the trend towards web-based apps grows there will also be a growing demand to do for web apps what Visual Basic and Access did for desktop apps.”

This is a rather odd statement considering Visual Basic.Net is among the top few languages used for web application programming in the world today (alongside java, PHP, et al). If you mean to say that there is no web-based IDE for a VB-like environment, well there is a good reason for that: such an animal would be an abominably terrible alternative to Eclipse or Visual Studio. There may come a time when everything can be turned into a web-based application, however we are not remotely close to that yet. Javascript is not the answer to every question.

I have not actually beta tested it yet (haven’t gotten an invitation) but from what I can tell, it’s fully hosted. Not only is the creation process hosted, but the application itself is hosted on thier servers and databases.

This is fine, I’m okay with web apps. I’m sure people might use it for really simple applications, but it is definitely not a substitute for a good developer. I wouldn’t think of using a hosted service like this to create an application I was thinking of selling access to, or relying on to run my business (such as e-commerce or inventory management). If they went out of business, or just had a failure, you’d be stuck without your data and without any way to move.

If they had an export feature, which let you export your application to PHP or even .NET, this would really take off. I’d pay a licensing fee to be able to export my application and run it on my own servers. Heck, that would be an awesome service!

I don’t know – maybe I’m missing something. If that’s how it works, please correct me.

Coghead is not about displacing developers, it is about giving better capabilities to a large existing class of developers and would-be developers. These people are generally not ‘professional software engineers’, but they use things like spreadsheets, desktop DB tools like FileMaker & Access, or possibly even web tools like ColdFusion, PHP, or ASP.NET to develop applications for themselves and for others. They generally ‘live’ in or in close proximity to the problems they solve. There is clearly a broad spectrum of application need, and likewise there is diversity in the type of developer capabilities required to meet those needs. There are many needs where proximity to the problem and domain understanding are most important, and where the software engineering challenges are less daunting.

n2000

The Coghead backend is Java-based with and embedded DB and BPEL process engine.

I’d definitely use it for prototyping apps. It looks to be about the best thing I’ve seen for doing something like that for the non tech.

Here is a b2.0 article about how Coghead could displace the big companies. I don’t necessarily agree but there is a niche.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/09/1.....2006092014

What I would like to see is people being able to sell their “apps” for $5 bucks and to be able to plug them into their own apps on Coghead. Or to create a place for modules that people can make publically available. It would also be nice to export these applications off coghead to be rolled out on a private intranet.

This kind of thing will never replace developers but it has its place.

#17 “If they had an export feature, which let you export your application to PHP or even .NET, this would really take off. I’d pay a licensing fee to be able to export my application and run it on my own servers. Heck, that would be an awesome service!”

The way I see it is that if you have the know-how to export an app from their service to deploy, configure, and run it on your own servers - you should have the know-how to create the simple app on your own. I doubt this will do anything more than create *very* simple apps, the ones that would make real programmers laugh at.

I see a service like this as something that could be great for building widgets, but not entire applications.

As noted above, the classic problem with any tool that tries to make development easy for non-developers is that sooner or later you end up with a tool that either doesn’t do much, or else has a learning curve that will frighten off the noobs.

Filemaker would be the application that’s managed to walk this particular tightrope the best. It’s easy to start using out of the box, but is powerful enough to be reasonably scaleable. Filemaker has built a comfortable $100-million business on this model. And in the process, they’ve created many jobs for programmers to create, maintain, and fix Filemaker applications; far more jobs, I would suggest, than have been eliminated because of Filemaker’s ease of use.

The point of these build-your-own applications platforms is not to replace developers. It is to empower non-developers with better tools to solve the problems of the day.

It is safe to say that the audience of non-programmers (i.e. your average business user) is thousands of times larger than that of programmers. In the United States business users probably outnumber developers by at least 1000 to 1 (if you include SMBs which typically have zero IT/dev workers).

The economic gravity of this situation is undeniable. Bringing even a fraction of the power of application development into the hands of the average business user is a game-changing proposition. Each incremental improvement toward this goal allows significant productivity gains over the next.

I agree with some other commenters here: we have been on this road for 15+ years. But in my opinion, where many seem to go wrong is in downplaying the significance of “the most basic business applications”. There is a very good reason why Microsoft has for over a decade included Access as part of its 5-pronged application monopoly on our desktops along with Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook.

Business applications are all about empowering the average user to collaborate more effectively to solve the problems of the day. Naturally this pushes us as vendors to find better ways of giving users more power to do whatever they need to do with our software rather than someone else’s. Opening up as much of the app stack as possible for the user to control is the only way to achieve this on a large scale because business users increasingly do not have the time to wait for, or the resources to rely on, software developers and IT to solve these problems for them.

Power shifts such as this occur gradually via incremental improvements that are easily adopted by increasing numbers of the population — in this case business users. I don’t think many of these “build your own” vendors believe they have done anything revolutionary in their own right. They are, however, each in their own way contributing to the gradual shift of power to the business user. And this is really an inevitable shift given the economics of the 1:1000 dev/non-dev ratio.

We will no doubt see more services like CogHead and AppExchange and DabbleDB. This is a market that is demanding to be served. Moving forward, some of the greatest challenges facing these solutions will be ease of use and a learning curve that really needs to be leveled. It will take a while before building a collaborative web-based app to solve a particular business problem becomes as intuitive as building a spreadsheet (DabbleDB should be applauded in their efforts to move us forward here). Best of luck to CogHead!

Excellent points, Matt, and by and large I agree with you. Where I think you miss the mark, though, is overestimating the number of non-developers who WANT to spent their time creating tools.

This is one of those areas where being in the tech industry can divorce you from the reality of life in the rest of the business community. If you take the average manager when faced with a business problem and no solution to hand — the first thing that comes to his/her mind is NOT going to be “what I need to do is create an application to help me solve this!”. Some few will, but by and large people want solutions pre-written.

It’s like the old Sinclair. People didnt want to buy computers that they would have to program themselves in order to do anything useful.

It will be interesting to see if this is the beginning step in taking basic software development to the masses in the same way that technology has disrupted other businesses like media, investing, banking etc.

Need invitation code to try this out, something I’ve been waiting for, maybe I can use instead of a portal for an idea.

NJG, thanks for the response and I agree with you — most people don’t want to build their own tools (I don’t think I actually attempted to provide any kind of estimate on the number of non-developers who want to spend time creating tools, although I wish I had a good sense for this). In any case I think we are on the same page.

Using your example of the average manager, I imagine what they really want to experience is:
1. Quickly find a tool designed for the job
2. Quickly customize that tool as needed to do the job *their* way
3. Quickly roll it out to other users in the group/business to collaborate effectively

Like Filemaker, part of CogHead’s strategy looks to be providing a growing base of templates users can start from so essentially they don’t have to build apps from scratch unless they are of heartier stock. I agree that the actual number of users who want to build apps from scratch may be smaller than these vendors might hope for, but I also think that the number of users who will try out pre-built apps (i.e. app templates) is much much larger and this is where they are most likely to get hooked in.

Once your average manager gets into an existing app and feels that it can do most of the job, leading them through a few customization concepts here and there to change the app for their specific situational needs is not much of a challenge. In this way, perhaps without realizing it, the manager becomes a psuedo-developer because they are so empowered (this is exactly what has happened with so many Salesforce.com users). Before you know it this person will know enough basic concepts to build their own apps from scratch, and potentially publish them as templates for others to start from.

By providing an open exchange for publishing/sharing/rating such application templates, platforms like this may begin to provide useful places for the average manager to start looking for the tools they need, get hooked, and become part of the ecosystem itself.

I’d like to try this out. However, I cannot help but think of prior efforts and how they were ultimately derailed. Not because these are bad ideas. They are not. Mainly because these tools reach a diminishing point of return as they evolve. Initially they are fun and exciting to use. However, as the user requirements evolve, you find that the tool cannot meet the requirements (usually when it comes to creating ‘business logic’). Then the tools evolve and before long they become full-fledged development environments with complex IDEs and scripting languages in which to create biz logic. Then they become unusable to the target audience.

I know, it’s a vicious cycle that’s repeated over and over again. This is how PeopleSoft started with PeopleTools. There are numerous other examples.

That being said, I’m excited that Coghead uses BPEL, presumably with extensions since BPEL assumes humans don’t exist, and that web services are created as a by-product.

Final thought. Don’t think the big boys aren’t also playing in this area. SAP has Visual Composer, and Oracle has Application Express (arguably a better implementation than SAP’s VC).

Best of luck to Coghead! I hope I can try it.

Great, but it is 10:30pm Eastern and Coghead still requires an invitation. Not yet open to the public.

Can anyone tell me how this is different from QuickBase (which has been around in various forms for a number of years)? I’m still in my test period with QuickBase and have been building some business apps for my small business. It works quite well, but if Coghead proves to be better, I might hold off on buying QBase. Also, anyone have any idea how they are pricing Coghead?

And by the way, as a target customer (non-techie, business manager type), I really like this approach to apps. Salesforce is kind of expensive, as are many SaaS solutions. And couldn’t we marry something like this up with NetVibes type solutions (widgets) and have a new paradigm for systems Don’t know (kind of beyond my understanding of things), but there would seem to be possibilities there.

Finally, if you look at what QuickBase did internally to manage their supply chain with QB (something I do know something about), it’s a reasonably robust system

Anyone interested in discussing these typs of platforms further? I’ve created Google Group for this purpose with an initial post attempting to list all of the vendors in this space.

Homepage:
http://groups.google.com/group.....f-web-apps

Group email:
do-it-yourself-web-apps@googlegroups.com

Description:
An informal discussion about do it yourself web application builders, specifically Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms that enable business users to create custom web applications from scratch and/or pre-existing application “templates”

Recently, the idea of building custom business applications has become “trendy.” Virtually overnight two systems, ZoHo Creator and Coghead, have been getting a lot of attention from bloggers and the media. However, people are overlooking the most time-tested source of web-based platforms for custom-built business applications. There has been a system on the market for over 5 years successfully doing the same thing ZoHo Creator and Coghead aim to do. This system is Interneer Intellect.

Interneer Intellect holds patents protecting much of the instant application building capabilities. This fact, on top of the years of development it has already undergone, inhibits Coghead from directly competing (in my opinion).

If you are considering using ZoHo Creator or Coghead to build custom applications for your business I would suggest also looking into Interneer Intellect. All three systems offer their own unique strong points… but Interneer Intellect by far has the longest list of functions and capabilities. This in itself is reason enough to register at Interneer’s site and view the product demo and/or white papers.

http://www.interneer.com/landingpages/gaw/rpd.asp

http://www.interneer.com

I’m a developer working at the Stanford Medical School and started looking for a internet-based application that was as easy to develop as FileMaker for novice users but that didn’t have all of FM’s limitations (proprietary backend database, no separation of data and metadata, own scripting language, severe limitations in the size of the application and the number of users, etc.). To my mind by far the best application out there to date is Servoy, a 100% Java-based application developed in Holland that lets you deploy the same ’solution’ as a client application or as a browser-based application and which was released in 2003 (www.servoy.com).

Another similar application to Coghead is Aware IM which has been out for about a year or so but it too has this annoying method of ‘neutering’ the standard, recognized words/language that developers normally share like table, column, relations, primary keys, etc. The idea I guess is that this makes it easier for the complete novice to get off the ground and not be intimidated. FileMaker was the most successful company to go that route and it was able to bring a degree of ‘database-awareness’ to a large number of users. The problem was that in using a proprietary language and database, they were not able and are still not able to scale up to the demands of the developers or the growth of their customers databases. Apple was in a similar state with OS 9 but they recognized it early enough and instead grounded their OS on UNIX and now have arguably the best, most solid OS out there. But the best, most polished and well thought out application development tool out there that I have seen to date that meets all these needs is Servoy: Rapid Application Development, browser-based (or application-based too in Servoy’s case), scalable to the “developer’s” level of expertise, completely scalable in the to the number of users as well as the size of the solution/application and finally as a Java-based tool it works seamlessly with any OS: Mac, Linux or Windows. Plus it has the advantage of having hundreds of well-established, successful applications already out there for several years in both large and small companies.

- With their application you can create solutions that can be accessed via your browser or via a client application all from the same server. (My feeling is that if you have clients who are using a solution all day long it is much, much better to do this with an actual client application than via a web browser for a whole slew of reasons: faster than a web application even with Web 2.0, AJAX, etc. with local caching, more customizable with shortcut keys and so on, no worries about the vagaries of the different browsers and OSes, etc. Others though prefer to have everything via the browser and with Servoy you can publish the exact same form via the client app or the browser or both simultaneously and all with the same look and feel.)

- scales to the level of the developer. For the ‘knowledge’ user you can create a nice simple UI with no experience with SQL or programming. Good, creative programmers love it too because
a) it uses industry standards for everything: SQL/XML, JavaScript (or Java if you choose) and JavaBeans or Java Plugins for industry-specific extensions
b) eliminates the drudgery of form creation as well as speeding the process up with simple drag-and-drop creation of fields, tab panels, buttons, images, etc.
c) allows modular development so that whole sections of a solution (crm, scheduling, document management and so on) can be simply added or dropped to or from any project
d) the independent developer with good JavaScript or Java programming skills can make solutions that are totally generic and yet completely customizable for a whole range of different companies and even industries. All the client has to do is add a few company logos, choose their ’style’ or theme, fill in their industry-specific ‘key words’ so that tab panel headings, drop-down boxes, etc. are directly related to their specific company.
e) complete granular control of all business rules including being able to take advantage of any database tools such as stored procedures, triggers, etc. for greater speed, uniformity and smooth integration with other database access tools.

- comes with a default database - Sybase ASA - but works equally well with any JDBC-compliant SQL database (e.g. Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.). An entire solution/application can be simply switched from one database to another, including all the data and the metadata governing the solution with a few clicks and no change for the clients whether via the browser or the client app. For the novice user though with no SQL experience the default database and setup will get them going straight away.

We have been using Servoy here running various applications since 2004. The beauty of Servoy or Aware IM or maybe Coghead if/when it comes out is that there is a distinct advantage to having knowledgeable users intimately involved in the use and design of an application over ‘outside’ programmers who won’t ever understand all the subtle user needs without spending hours and hours (read dollars and dollars) involved in the project. The unique beauty of Servoy is that you get the best of both worlds scaling to both ends of the spectrum. For anybody interested in this sort of application I would recommend checking it out.

(P.S. They also have enormously helpful, friendly and knowledgeable customer support for free via their forum - http://forum.servoy.com)

Rob, we were wondering the same thing, i.e., “couldn’t we marry something like this up with NetVibes type solutions (widgets) and have a new paradigm for systems”.

We feel that enteprise portals could take a leaf out of web start pages such as NetVibes. The time has come for personalized portals that can very easily be setup and changed by administrators. And even more easily personalized by portal users to meet individual needs.

We have been working on this for some time now, and today we are pleased to announce the public beta of our hosted service (http://datamashups.com) for small enterprises and workgroups. It provides:

* personalized portals (enterprise start pages)
* custom, composite business views and applications

These portals, views and applications combine data and screens from many sources

* enterprise data (e.g. from your Excel spreadsheets),
* web services (e.g. Salesforce.com, Amazon or Google web services),
* web widgets (e.g. Google or Yahoo maps and gadgets),
* and other web applications (e.g. Zoho Writer).

For more info, please visit http://datamashups.com

This is great stuff. I’ve been working with a company called mTuitive. They have what they call an ‘Authoring Environment’ which is even slicker and easier to use than this. There’s a demo on their website:

http://www.mtuitive.com/auth_screencast.htm

I believe this technology is the future of building apps since it allows non-programmers to essentially write code without writing code.

I have to concur with John Allen about Servoy. It is unclear to me what back ends Coghead can connect to. After a decade of Total Immersion in FileMaker Pro development, I have one key piece of advice for “knowledge worker” end-users as well as for developers looking around for this “5GL” type of IDE — STICK WITH STANDARDS, STAY AWAY FROM PROPRIETARY LANGUAGES AND FORMATS.

John listed a lot of the benefits of Servoy; I’ll add a few:

– Code your application ONCE and deploy multiple ways, including via rich client or web browser

– Works with any existing SQL data … I don’t know about Coghead but AwareIM is only “aware” of databases one creates via AwareIM, whereas Servoy connects to existing data sources (and can also be used to create tables & columns on the back end)

– Can connect multiple data sources in one application. For example, you can build an application that connects your timesheet system, your accounting data, and your shipping software.

– Can’t say it enough: STANDARDS-BASED. If a developer gets overloaded with Servoy work (or if a “knowledge worker” gets in over their head and needs to call in some professional help), and if s/he can’t find a Servoy developer (though there are more and more of this breed every week!), finding someone who at least knows javascript (Servoy’s scripting language) is a cinch.

One more point. I don’t know how many times I’ve been called in to “finish up” an application that an end-user started trying to do themselves using FMP or Servoy. Luckily both of these products, Servoy in particular, have rich scripting and calc functions, so one can take a rudimentary application and build it stronger/higher/deeper using the same tool that it was started with. I know that with AwareIM as soon as you need more than the very limited set of “actions” and functions that it comes with, you must be a Java programmer to do more. I wonder what happens with Coghead when you “hit the wall” of the application’s capabilities, have tapped out the forum, and really need a professional to achieve the results you were hoping for … “who you gonna call?” … will there ever be a community of professional developers around a product like this? Is it worth it for them to invest time learning a product that has a low-end target market? And even if a pro did learn Coghead, what happens when the needs are just more complex than the IDE can support — you’d have to start over completely using a different tool.

Servoy, as John pointed out, serves the knowledge worker as well as the high-end developer … one can simply use the “prefab” javascript commands listed there in the method editor, or (according to one’s level of interest & ability) can write very sophisticated stuff with javascript, inline Java … and can employ all kinds of plug-ins and beans too.

I also worry about all these products being created for Joe the Boat Builder and Sarah The Production-floor Manager to supposedly roll their own web apps … without any understanding of transctional databasing on the back end. The extent to which amateurs can mess up a database (because they never heard of a transaction lock and would not know what a dirty read means) is frightening. At least FMP and Servoy have built-in mechanisms for pretty high assurance of data integrity. But this stuff cannot be controlled via the stateless connection of a web app, unless one really knows what one is doing and is using a tool/language that can handle all the concurrency issues…. But that’s another thread I guess.

May be late to the party here, but I couldn’t resist leaving a comment of my own. About zeroCode, our product in this space. I don’t want to sound sales-y, but I think we’ve dealt with pretty every one of the issues listed in these discussions: the app construction process is simple and effective, you can build complex stuff (including webs services, AJAX front-ends, transactions, etc.) and what’s built scales and scales, thanks to a very strong runtime engine. It’s all Java and XML behind the scenes, but just clicking through in the Design Environment. And, best of all, you do all this in a browser - no applets, no AJAX in the construction process.
The one thing we DON’T do is move Excel to a database - we never thought that’s a serious issue when you’re building an industrial-strength app, since you’d spend a fair amount of time designing a database that actually has tables and relationships.
Would love to hear comments - check us out at http://www.zeroCode.com. And please pardon the website - I don’t believe we go as good a job as most others in presenting our value proposition clearly there. Got to go out and hire that MBA…

Yes all these apps look good but alot of large organisations won’t want to host their data on the public internet. Also a key business need is to be able to create views of existing data from the large RDBMS vendors, not import a spreadsheet! Also it means keeping the data in-sync is a problem.