A Coglet is a slice of application functionality that can be embedded in a regular Web page. Coglets are perfect for anyone trying to build a dynamic web site using custom forms, tables, views, and more. The best part about a Coglet is that you don’t need to know any coding to create some very powerful websites using Coghead as the backend database.

At first I thought this was a widget spec but it’s not. On one level it is in that Coghead application components can be embedded in web pages, blogs, or wikis to enable database forms and views. However, rather than using scripting to embed said components they are using iframes, which for a variety of rendering, event handling, and security issues, generally suck. So rather than executing a function via an API they are embedding the function by wrapping it, a subtle but meaningful distinction.

Having said that, this is a very cool way to do distributed data collection and to empower web applications quickly and reliably. I just wish they went with scripting instead.

UPDATE: Read Dan’s comment below, he provides clarification on one aspect of this that I didn’t get when reading up on Coglets.

Tags: Coghead