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Coghead Shifts to Flex Platform


App dev environment now runs on Amazon's systems

By Alex Handy
January 14, 2008 — 
It seems that old FileMaker applications never die, they just move onto a server underneath someone's desk. In an effort to eliminate such legacy data-driven applications, Coghead has moved its Web application development environment onto the Adobe Flex platform, and reinforced its online offerings with Amazon's hosted services.

Developers searching for a quick and connected way to replace aging spreadsheets and Microsoft Access applications might seek out Coghead's rich client, which according to the company serves as both a development and a runtime environment for SaaS-like applications. The client software enables drag-and-drop application design, and backs it up with SaaS-style hosting in Coghead's servers. But with version 2.0, those servers have been transferred into Amazon's cloud of servers and storage.

Although the company decided to rewrite the entire application from scratch in Adobe's Flex, the underlying functionality of Coghead's rich client has not changed in version 2.0. Previous versions had been based on OpenLaszlo, but Greg Olsen, CTO and founder of Coghead, said the Flex version is significantly more responsive and usable. This makes a big difference for end-users, who use and access Coghead applications through the same client used for development, he noted. Developers simply use a higher level of access, and thus have the ability to move and change the elements displayed to end-users.

The Coghead client is a visual development environment targeted at front-line users who need to construct simple applications that replace existing tools embedded in databases or spreadsheets. With Coghead’s back-end system now running on Amazon's S3 storage system and running on top of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), this SaaS solution to desktop problems is now more reliable and can accommodate larger applications, claimed Olsen.

He added that Coghead has been used to build all manner of data-driven applications. “I'd say the applications are functionally all over the place, from custom lead management to organizational management things. There's a lot of small business applications or departmental applications in larger companies. People use our product to solve problems they might have used spreadsheets or FileMaker to solve in the past,” said Olsen.

Coghead 2.0 runs on any system that supports Adobe Flex applications. The software costs US$50 for a five-user license, and additional licenses can be purchased for $10 per user.

For the future, Olsen said that he'd like to improve Coghead's integration. Currently, Coghead applications can be integrated with outside applications, but Olsen said he'd hope to expand the range of possible integrations and work with ISVs to bring in targeted integrations. Additionally, Olsen said future versions should allow users to run applications offline.


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