Coghead 2.0: Built on Adobe Flex, Hosted By Amazon
Coghead is also now hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Web service. “Amazon knows a lot more about running data centers than we do,” CEO Paul McNamara says of the move to Amazon. The way he sees it, he is now offering an easy on-ramp for anyone who wants to create an Amazon-hosted application simply by using Coghead.
The move to Adobe Flex is what gives the site its performance boost. On Flex versus Ajax, McNamara says:
A lot of people are talking about Ajax, but we see a world that goes beyond Ajax.
What attracted him to Flex was the cross-platform, cross-browser interoperability and the prospect of creating offline apps with Adobe AIR. He expects to offer offline capabilities to Coghead users by the middle of 2008. Coghead has attracted 25,000 registered users since launching last April, but its ambition, says McNamara, is to go after the “50 million businesses that don’t have a server.” It still has a long way to go, but this upgrade should help it attract its next set of users.