With the first major release of WorkflowFirst underway, I thought it might be a good opportunity to take a step back and give some background to why we created WorkflowFirst, and what place we think it has in the market.

The writing has been on the wall for a while now: NoSQL databases, web over desktop apps, and the kind of craving for simplicity that's broken loose in the sleek design of Apple products. It was just a matter of time before the trend infiltrated the database market.

Even in this day and age, your average user wanting to create a database is faced with insurmountable technological hurdles: how do they take the knowledge of their problem and turn that into such complex constructs as relational tables, joins, queries, views? And then, how do they wire that up to the forms that they had in mind? And this is before they've even considered the actual business logic they want to implement.

It's really no wonder many of these enterprise workers settle on using Excel, with its point and click canvas and simple calculation language, even though this is a tool never designed to be a database.

After a few years businesses drown in these spreadsheets, and their only alternative is to make their life even harder by translating the spaghetti of calculations into something like an Access database.

We feel their pain. WorkflowFirst was designed to let these people focus on creating data structures the way they think of them.

People find it very easy to think in terms of folders. They're used to it. People love to categorize, and breaking down categories into sub-categories is equally enjoyable. They're not always perfect, but thinking in hierarchies is natural.

Databases don't work that way, though. They expect you to think of data as lists, and the relation between those lists is defined afterwards. For most of us, it leaves us scratching our heads.

So we took this idea that people naturally think about data hierarchically. We made an interface that captures those folder structures, those categories. And then we wrote a tool that turns those structures into a complete web application.

And by complete, I mean complete. It transparently generates a database, a user interface, all the forms, all the controls, all the upgrading as you change those structures. It does everything.

But that wasn't quite enough. That creates a database. But people usually want more than just a place to store things: they want a system that can make decisions, and be intelligent. So we added workflow and scripting.

Workflow is another thing that is often quite unwieldy. We've used these flow-chart designers and find them useful for only a handful of things. You start out being in awe of how powerful they are, but then you realize that anything remotely useful quickly mushrooms into a vast network of complex logic paths.

So again we looked at how most people think of workflow. Most of the time workflow just involves collecting information from different people, and routing it based on simple conditions. So we wanted to make that most common scenario the easiest to implement, and that's precisely what WorkflowFirst's workflow system sets out to achieve.

Once again, we adopted the concept of a hierarchy even for workflow - because it seems so natural. Each node in our hierarchy is a point where we're collecting information, and then immediately after that, we branch into decisions that are made either by the user (by pressing buttons) or by a simple calculation.

In the hands of an average worker, both of these features, together, create an amazingly powerful platform. They let people take their visions for how business problems should be solved, and turn them into real, professional applications.

You see, WorkflowFirst isn't just a database. It's an application development platform. It creates standalone apps that can be distributed to others, even sold. These same apps can be run on a web browser anywhere, and even on an iPhone or iPad. It used to take an army of programmers to do this - now we let even non-programmers turn their ideas into salable, professional web applications.

We want to empower business analysts. Those guys who aren't programmers, but they're pretty good at Excel and most importantly: they know their business. We want to give them the tools they need to rapidly realize their visions so they can grow their business at the speed of their own ideas.

Sure there will be times when you'll need a programmer, or just someone who isn't scared of scripting things, like loops. That's why we've added in DbfScript - a simple yet powerful scripting language that can be edited right inside the browser window. WorkflowFirst is event-driven, making it very easy to add scripts to control changes to any part of the database. It also has a wide variety of ways you can plugin code from other systems and languages.

We've added a wealth of features to WorkflowFirst - but perhaps the most amazing thing about this platform is how you get all of this for free. So what's to lose? Download WorkflowFirst and start realizing those dreams. And don't forget to let us know how we're doing so we can make it even better!

Thanks,
John Wood