Build Your Own Application With Coghead

I have been invited to participate in Coghead beta program. Coghead's catch line is a:

Simple, powerful new way to create web-based business applications that can be used by anyone, anytime, anywhere!

Their application is built using OpenLaszlo and provides a very responsive user experience. I have been evaluating their application and they definitely get the idea right. End users have a multitude of needs for business application. We could refer to this as the long tail of business applications. And IT cannot respond to everyone of those needs in a scalable manner. Therefore it makes sense to create an application that empowers business users to quickly create applications as their needs occur. Coghead Gallery provides a number of application templates to quickly get started.


Where I personally find that Coghead falls short is with its concept of collection Coghead allows users to build applications made collections, forms, views, and actions. Collections are objects used by the application. They contain records. A collection describes a data structure, and provides tools for viewing and modifying data of that type. Records are the actual data that is stored; each record is an instance of the data defined by the Collection. For example, if you have a collection “Purchase Orders” then a record would be the data that makes up one purchase order.

Though a powerful concept, it does not go far enough in my opinion. Business application needs go beyond the need to assemble collections. Nevertheless, this is a good start and a nice application.