What if the next time you longed for a piece of software to help you do your job, you could simply create the software yourself, in a few easy steps? That’s the promise of some do-it-yourself online web application builder tools, like Coghead, Dabble DB, Zoho Creator, Caspio etc.
What is special about these tools is that the users require less technical skills because the process is all drag-and-drop and visual. And because its all web based, there’s never any software to worry about or hardware to install.
I recently received a beta invite to review Coghead, and I was largely impressed with the “DIY” factor. Coghead provides a web-based platform with complete drag-n-drop, mapping, workflow, and other development features to enable delivery of applications that require zero infrastructure setup costs on your side.
However, I also felt that such tools are most apt for business users as they are generally suitable for management processes like CRM, Sales, HR, Finance, Project Management etc.
Such tools, and Coghead in particular, provide Rapid Application Development (RAD) capabilities and comprehensive set of module construction tools, but I won’t badge them with the “Visual Basic for the Web” tag, yet!
In any case, the online application building space is becoming interesting and I am sure that we will see these apps and more like them evolve further.