COGHead hits the dead pool! We were very active in writing Rich Interent Applications (RIA) through the use of COGHead. COGHead however was purchased by SAP and is no longer being offered as a 3rd party development platform. Needless to say we were very distressed by SAP’s consumption of COGHead. But with every change comes new opportunity and for OMBNexGen that opportunity has resulted in our getting smart in two additional development tools: The first is the sophisticated and interesting “wrapped” development platform offered through PerfectForms. The second is Adobe Flex.

PerfectForms is a solution we call a “wrapped” development platform similar to COGHead. (By wrapped we mean an application that wraps development languages with databases, application connectors, and infrastructure into a single RIA creation platform.) While we were not looking for an alternative to COGHead, over the past month of getting very facile on PerfectForms we have discovered PerfectForms is a much more powerful solution than COGHead. In addition, unlike COGHead, we have the ability to license / purchase the product in the event we or our clients want to actually own the PerfectForms software. (Yes that means we don’t have to worry about PerfectForms being pulled from the market.)

In addition we decided to make the investment in becoming Flex programmers to further avoid the issues of having our development platform being absorbed by ingenuity absorbing companies like SAP. COGHead and PerfectForms use Flex as part of their wrapping technologies. In effect we have extended our RIA skill sets by investing in knowing the source languages being used in our wrapped offerings. The investment in knowing Flex is the suspenders with a belt approach to making sure we can provide our clients a safer approach to developing and delivering Rich Internet Applications.

To learn more about the cool and useful ways we can use PerfectForms to move your back office systems to the Internet, go to our section on PerfectForms by clicking HERE!