Coghead 2.0 flips to Adobe Flash and Amazon EC2
Date : 2008 01 13 Category : Web Webware.comCoghead on Monday will launch a second version of its hosted application development platform, which the start-up has moved to Adobe's Flex/Flash technology and Amazon's EC2 computing infrastructure.
Coghead's hosted service for making Web applications.
(Credit: Coghead)The company is one of several targeting what it calls "do-it-yourself developers" at small- and medium-size businesses.
These people are tech-savvy enough to write macros in Excel or work with scripting languages but don't have the same level of training as a professional C++ programmer, for example. The company estimates that there are between 15 and 30 million of these do-it-yourselfers, compared with between 3 and 4 million more highly trained programmers.
With its service, people can visually put together applications by creating forms and by setting up a work flow customized to their needs. It has signed 25,000 developers.
To improve the performance of its applications, Coghead rewrote the front end of its service in Flex, Adobe's application development environment. Applications are displayed using Flash.
The company abandoned another rich Internet application framework, OpenLaszlo, because Flex brought it significantly better performance, according to company CEO Paul McNamara. Adobe also has a broader ecosystem of third-party tools, he said.
Also, by moving to Adobe technology, Coghead can allow its developers to create applications using AIR, the Adobe Integrated Runtime. Coghead will release an update in the middle of the year with the ability to make AIR Web applications that can run online or function as desktop applications.
Its move to Amazon's computing structure, including Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3), will save Coghead money and provide customers with a more reliable and structure, McNamara said.