Introducing CodeGlide, a New Open Source Mashup and Data Integration Company

Economic downturn or no, the open source data integration market remains active. In late January, Talend announced a $12 million C round of financing. Over the past two years, the company's open source data integration solution has been downloaded 3.3 million times, and the company now boasts hundreds of customers. Other vendors in the market, such as SnapLogic, continue to add connectors and develop their capabilities.

And now comes a new vendor to the scene: CodeGlide, an open source company with a broad business application platform and big ambitions. I spoke recently with Mauro DeGennaro, CodeGlide's co-founder and Vice President of Software Development. He filled me on the company's approach, offerings, and direction.

CodeGlide was founded in May 2007. The company's goal is to offer a comprehensive suite of open source business applications, including:

• Fusion, an open source data integration platform for building mashups
  
• SnapCRM, an open source CRM suite (with a provocative title, since the company competes against SnapLogic)
  
• Rendezvous, an open source collaboration suite, which offers calendaring, document management, and project management features
  

These three platforms are available in an Enterprise Suite bundle, which is the company's most popular download.

Speaking of downloads, CodeGlide seems to be off to a fast start. The company's Web site came on line on January 15. I spoke to Mauro about a week ago, and already the company had racked up 11,000 downloads of its software. Through its partners, the company has sold its Professional Edition to six different companies.

Partners are also lending their expertise to help the company develop other applications, including an E-learning application, an ERP application, and a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that will compete against Coghead", LongJump, and other PaaS solution providers.

CodeGlide has a core development team of ten programmers, who are augmented by free-lancers and sub-companies that offer domain expertise in areas such as ERP. Business people and design experts design new features, which the developers then build. Of course, being an open source company, CodeGlide can expect to receive further enhancements and features from its open source community, as well. The company is small, but global: development is based in Argentina, Q.A. in India, sales in Europe and the U.S.

The CodeGlide Approach

CodeGlide's goal is to offer open source business solutions for the SMB market. It wants to make mashups and data integration solutions available to developers without advanced programming skills and even to business people. Accordingly, the company offers a visual tool for building mashups and creating widgets. For example, using Fusion, it's possible to construct a mashup that reads two Excel files and extracts data for a Sales report. A customer is using the product to read VoIP usage reports for billing. You can watch a video of that mashup being built here.

To keep development simple and straightforward, the company has developed a high-level scripting language, X#. The CodeGlide platform converts X# to Java. Of course, creating a new scripting language is risky: anything new or different can be a barrier to adoption. But if the scripting language really is both powerful and simple, and if the design tools minimize even the exposure to X#, CodeGlide may find that its reach really does extend to less technical users, who may have shunned mashups and Web 2.0 development until now.

To build mashups, users drag connectors and logical functions onto a design pane. Right-clicking on a connector or function opens a dialog box for configuring it. To select content or check for conditional status, developers use a filter function. There's also a foreach component for processing input items in turn.

As far as data integration goes, the company boasts an extensive set of connectors, including connectors for popular databases, including MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and DB2; common file types, such Excel; email services, such as POP3 and IMAP; and Web services, including WSDL-based SOAP services. A "screen-scraper" connector enables developers to access content displayed on Web pages.

Overall, it's a broad feature set for a young company. CodeGlide software is licensed under GLPv3. The Professional Edition of the Fusion mashup and data integration platform is available for $10,000, which is a one-time fee. DeGennaro points out that this price is far below the price of other mashup platforms, such as JackBe.

Low price. Lots of features. Big plans. CodeGlide could do well in an IT environment where business are looking for lots of bang for their buck.

Moore's Law for Data Integration

The year is 1999, and your company wants to customize its new CRM system so sales people can access contract records from the Finance department's database. The CRM system itself took 9 months to deploy. Everyone's tired of the training classes. The six consultants who implemented the CRM system have lost a few people and gained a few people. Looks like they'll be bringing in someone else to manage this customization, which should take 4-5 months, tops.

Flashforward to 2008. It's September, you're using SugarCRM as your CRM system. You'd like to, again, integrate your CRM system with your Finance system. This time you'd like to do it using MindTouch Deki, a popular open source wiki and collaboration platform, and SnapLogic, an open source data integration framework. Good choice: the entire project, from start to finish, is completed in under two weeks.

No big, expensive consulting contracts. No "tent village" of Big Four consultants camped out by the computer room. An IT manager conceives the project, and within two weeks, it's done.

There's a paradigm shift that's occurred in enterprise IT, and it promises to make the next few years genuinely exciting, despite the downturn.

Over the past decade, application vendors have learned the wisdom of first, opening their APIs, and second, eliminating the complexity of their APIs by adopting a RESTful Web services model for integration.

The result has been a increase in agility for business users and IT department that is proving to be as dramatic, in terms of applications deployments and end user experience, as Moore's law has been for hardware development. Moore's law, you'll recall, is Gordon Moore's observation, first made in 1965, that "the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years" (Wikipedia). Thanks to Moore's law, your bookbag can hold a laptop more powerful that a mainframe from a few decades ago. And you watch videos on your MP3 player, which is roughly the size of a pack of gum.

Open source and RESTful APIs (which make use of basic GETs and PUTs, rather than relying on more complex messaging schemes) give enterprise IT organization powerful building blocks for rapidly building new, powerful application solutions—applications that literally would have required man years of programming less than a decade ago.

A year ago, there was a lot of buzz about enterprise mashups that blended two or more data sources. Mashups are still exciting, but what's equally exciting is a kind of mashup occurring at the application level.

Today's announcement by Salesforce.com that its Force.com development platform would work with Facebook APIs, enabling Salesforce.com's 100,000-strong developer community to more easily access the vast library of applications built on Salesforce, is more evidence of this trend.

Other evidence of this trend:

• The ongoing success of the Web site, ProgrammableWeb, which serves as a portal for discovering application APIs and mashups. ProgrammableWeb now has 1,000 APIs in its API directory. Clearly, a lot of companies are publishing APIs.
  
• Once published, APIs often become the dominant channel for accessing an application. As ProgrammableWeb's John Musser points out in a blog post about the 1,000-API milestone:
  
  
  
  • 60% of eBay's listing come from their APIs, rather than through their browser-based interface.
    
  • Twitter's APIs carry 10x the traffic of its Web site.
    
  
  
• REST is becoming the dominant programming model for APIs. 63% of the APIs listed in ProgrammableWeb's directory are RESTful.
  
• New Content Management Systems, such as Alfresco Enterprise 3.0, feature REST interfaces so they can easily access business data from other IT systems.
  
• New applications, such as an increasingly popular network management/IT operations platform offered by an Indian company, use REST APIs to facilitate communication among components. RESTful integration enables one product, for example, a network troubleshooting tool, to easily pass information to a related component, such as a trouble-ticketing application used by a help desk.
  

Enterprise Management Associates analyst Dennis Drogseth is fond of saying that enterprise IT organizations know they need to move to a "lego world." No single IT system has a monopoly on vital data. Best practices call for the automated flow of information seamlessly from one system to another: from a network diagnostic tool to a help desk application, for example, or from a finance system into a wiki, which in turn is embedded in SugarCRM. The key to that flow is having components designed to fit together with other components, even from other vendors.

It sounds like a lot of work. It's dramatically less work than it used to be. Thanks to open APIs, REST, and Web-centric architectures, data integration and application development can beneft from a Moore's law of their own.