Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Coghead: democratized web development

Back in October I read a post about CogHead from Guy Kawasaki, the author of the best seller book "The Art of the Start".

CogHead simply looks amazing. It brings democratization of one of the most common web development task: create forms and workflows to support them. I haven't had the chance to play with it since the beta is still limited, but from what we can glean on the site, the service takes all its sense from several aspects:
  • zero install, everything is web based and makes good use of Web 2.0 concepts
  • intuitive visual design of web forms, simply drag and drop rich interface elements
  • collaboration throughout the conception, the development and the operation of the application
  • easy data collection and manipulation
  • amazing visual design of "actions", the workflow attached to a web form
  • of course, this would be of little use without system integration, so everything can be hooked up (or from) using Web Services
  • final touch is versioning, a must in any serious environment that evolves over time
Other similar solutions: FormBuilder from FormAssembly LLC and InfoPath from Microsoft. FormAssembly doesn't seems to go as far as CogHead. Although very powerful, InfoPath is still limited in its capacity to deploy rich internet applications, even in its latest 2007 incarnation.

I'm eager to be able to play with CogHead!

Note: I don't have any benefits derived from any of the aforementioned products or companies.