Today, Coghead is introducing the 2.0 version of its DIY, Web-based, enterprise-application development service. The site boasts a new user interface (screen shots below) based on Adobe Flex, with 50 new features and performance that is three times faster than the previous version. Basically, this amounts to a massive upgrade of its Website, but calling it Coghead 2.0 lets the company make a big deal about it. Some of the new features include a redesigned authoring environment, new drag and drop widgets, and support for Open ID.
Coghead is also now hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Web service. “Amazon knows a lot more about running data centers than we do,” CEO Paul McNamara says of the move to Amazon. The way he sees it, he is now offering an easy on-ramp for anyone who wants to create an Amazon-hosted application simply by using Coghead.
The move to Adobe Flex is what gives the site its performance boost. On Flex versus Ajax, McNamara says:
A lot of people are talking about Ajax, but we see a world that goes beyond Ajax.
What attracted him to Flex was the cross-platform, cross-browser interoperability and the prospect of creating offline apps with Adobe AIR. He expects to offer offline capabilities to Coghead users by the middle of 2008. Coghead has attracted 25,000 registered users since launching last April, but its ambition, says McNamara, is to go after the “50 million businesses that don’t have a server.” It still has a long way to go, but this upgrade should help it attract its next set of users.
typo in the first sentence : enterprise-application devlopment -> enterprise-application development
flex indeed allowed us to build our UI much faster/easier than it would have been possible with ajax. i like it a lot.
michael
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http://viibee.com – online dating is fun again
Looks like an interesting service but how would you get this inside the firewall? I’ve not worked in many corporates where they would happy for confidential information to be located on a server they didn’t manage – especially when it is owned by a relatively new ’startup’ rather than an established big tech brand such as SalesForce.
The brand name sounds quite ‘techie’ orientated – how would individuals outside of the tech circles come across the service in the first place? Marketing to local business start-up assistance agencies (such as Business Link in the UK) would be a good idea to increase adoption and acceptance.
Other than that, there are some good looking demo apps on the CogHead website, will be interesting to see how they mature! Good luck.
Me always pretty lucky – http://www.coghead.com just gave me this:
Unable to connect to database server
If you still have to install Drupal, proceed to the installation page.
If you have already finished installed Drupal, this either means that the username and password information in your settings.php file is incorrect or that we can’t connect to the MySQL database server. This could mean your hosting provider’s database server is down.
The MySQL error was: Too many connections.
[...]
No info on subscrption based or free.
http://tekno-wo...ld.blogspot.com
this reminds me: http://appjet.com/
i know they don’t have many common points, but from a developer perspective they’re web based, hosted and let you create applications
It’s been down for over an hour. Yup, Amazon runs a top rate service.
Perhaps they should put all of their infrastructure on the Amazon service?
Agree with QS
Information control is important, though it doesn’t get solved with big names like Salesforce or SAP.
A whole ecosystem needs to be there to support the business user and not just expect end-user to plunge into very technical configurations.
Gentle balance to be sought
Been trying to register earlier… went for 1 hour break… came back… and their server is down. Can it be they are not ready for the masses yet?
It’s a nice idea, its just a shame they got the stage, and not proving themselves.
Will be happy to try them out once they fix their platform.
Tried opening Coghead – it says >>>>
503 Service Unavailable
No server is available to handle this request.
Same here – 503 Service Unavailable. Guess that 2.0 rollout didn’t go so well.
good ad
site is not working
looks good, it was previously built first using opensource OpenLaszlo – similar to Flex.
Flex? That’s an immediate FAIL! No one writes serious apps in Flex because they feel heavy, require Flash and can’t be run on multitude of devices. Not to mention, it can’t be indexed by search engines.
I was able to create an account. Coghead upgrade looks like a winner.
I love the user interface
http://www.webepags.com
The website service interruption earlier this morning was our bad. The problem was a configuration error on our part. AWS is working like a champ.
Nice to know…
It´s an interesting service, just the easier and faster application development.
@3, they are targeting small businesses that don’t even manage a server. Regardless, that is the same argument people used to say about Salesforce not long ago.
@5, it is subscription based, $49 a pop.
My mom runs a small optometry shop. Something like this would be very useful for her but the home page is quite intimidating, even baffling to non-techies. If they want to sell to non-techies, why would they use “apps” and “applications” throughout their homepage? Horrid copywriting.
Gabe: I’m guessing they’re more VC-focussed than mom-focussed. Gotta keep the terminology insider-generic lest they pigeonhole themselves.
EH:
I see what you’re saying… but using the techie language is just another way of pigeonholing yourself.
In the CEOs own words- they’re going after the “50 million businesses that don’t have a server” – presumably, this would include my mom and other small business owners with lots of customer, sales, and inventory data.
For these type of apps I would rather use dabbledb, YadaShare, or Trackvia.
This is tooo good….!!!! its like a RAD for the web!!!
bookmarked @ http://livbit.com
If you want to run your app within the firewall, then you should take a look at novulo.
This closed system was a necessary phase. The logical conclusion of PaaS is OPaaS “Open Platform as a Service”. See ModBox http://www.sull...tems.com/modbox Now that Coghead is dead, customers should explores OPaaS.
Alternative for Coghead customers
http://perfectf...-ch-move-pf.php