Coghead lets you build simple web apps, not mashups

A colleague of mine last week suggested that I review Coghead as a mashup assembly platform. I've been spending the week with them and can conclude that they are neither a good nor a bad mashup platform. In fact, they aren't a mashup platform at all.

Coghead allow its users to construct simple web applications based on a back-end database. Both the application and the database are hosted by Coghead itself. They have an on-demand pricing model that is quite reasonable, with the price of a subscription increasing with the number of database records. For simple web applications in the long tail of applications development, web applications that don’t need to mash either data or visual elements, Coghead could be a very reasonable solution.

On the surface, Coghead offers capabilities similar to ActiveGrid, but only on the surface. While ActiveGrid also lets users create a web application driven from a back-end database, unlike Coghead, ActiveGrid allow users to create mashups both by exposing services and by calling out to them.

Let's start with what Coghead can do. I found it very easy to construct web forms, create search result lists, define business logic and otherwise manipulate database records. I had a fairly sophisticated app up and running within a couple of hours of signing in. The documentation is excellent, and the tutorials instructive. You really don't need to be technical to create a Coghead application. As with ActiveGrid, it's helpful to understand how relational databases work, but not absolutely necessary as long as your application is simple and doesn't require complex relationships between tables.

There were a few things I didn't Like about Coghead. It was easy to get the web forms set up, but it wasn't easy to get them just right. I'd say that most form designers will spend 90% of their time tweaking the last 10% of the form. Form tweaking and other minor problems were just annoying. The most pressing problem with Coghead was its performance. I've got an excellent connection here at the office, and I had only a small app on Coghead, yet creating, updating, and deleting records was slow, slow slow.

All this is in the noise, however. Because Coghead is not, repeat not, a mashup construction platform, business or otherwise. The only content they aggregate, and by aggregate they actually mean replicate, is by way of a csv file. That's a good choice for a database integration conduit, but it isn't a mashup. It's replication.

You might be wondering about coglets. Surely, you might think, coglets enable mashup construction. At least you might if you were on Coghead’s site and read about coglets. And what about mashouts. Don’t they count?

Sorry. Coglets are by no means mashup fodder. Coglets merely create individual web pages to display fragments of your application's data. I can create a single page, accessible through a URL, to display a single record or to display a view. I can then embed the URL into another web page. That isn’t a mashup. That’s at best a portal and at worst just a custom web page with a lot of iframes.

Mashouts go in the other direction. Mashouts allow you to use data from the current form as variables in HTTP get requests. These requests get triggered from the web form's context menu. (Web forms with context menus...you gotta love AJAX.) The target for the request is another browser altogether. That's not even a portal. It's a link to another application.

Let’s look at an example.

Let's say I want to have an application that consolidates all the tasks I have assigned to me. Let's also say that I get tasks from a project management system that publishes a project plan to the web, my Outlook TODO list, and from an issue tracking system used by R&D to assign maintenance tasks. There are at least four ways I could interact with these different task lists. First, I could jump from app to app to app. That’s not a mashup. It isn’t even an integration, but it’s the sort of capability provided by mashouts. You can jump from a Coghead app directly to another app in another browser. It’s our old siloed applications we know and love so well.

Second, I could copy all the data from the three apps either into a single database, or designate one of the applications as the master TODO list. Then I could access all my tasks from a single repository, hopefully with two-way replication so changed TODO data can be fed back into the original app. That isn’t a mashup, that’s a replication integration, one that has all the inherent problems associated with replicated data. These sorts of integrations are enabled through Coghead’s csv import/export feature.

Third, I could create a web page where I pull the content from the three apps into the single page. In one frame I’d see the project tasks, in another my Outlook tasks, in a third my issue management tasks. This is what you get with coglets. That’s not a mashup, that’s a portal.

Finally, I could construct an application that aggregates the information from all three applications into a single unified GUI. I could reference the data but not copy it, so all three applications retain their single copy of the TODO data. I could create a unified GUI so that, unless I drilled down on a specific task, I wouldn’t even realize the data were federated across three repositories. Were I to take this approach, I’d have a mashup. Unfortunately, there are no capabilities within Coghead applications that support this approach. At least not yet. Their documentation says they will have REST services available soon, meaning that while Coghead could participate in a mashup, they still wouldn't be a mashup platform.

Bottom line: Coghead can certainly help non-technical users develop web-based applications in the long tail of applications development. For the 80% solution, Coghead makes it easy to create, deploy and even pay for those pesky applications for which there are no IT resources. It won’t be a mashup, but it could be enough for you.