Who competes with BungeeConnect?
By Vivek Puri | March 16th, 2008 at 11:56 am ET
Couple of posts on BungeeLabs in the last 2 days that caught my attention. First by Techcrunch and the second by Venturebeat. Both the posts claim:
Bungee Connect competes with DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks.
Well, that’s not exactly correct. Actually not even anywhere near being correct. It’s like saying SAP competes with any Foobar ERP software development company. I am not saying the LongJump and Coghead aren’t great works of software development. But what they do and offer in no terms competes with BungeeConnect.
What BungeeConnect provides is an OOP based On-Demand Application Development Platform. BungeeConnet enables team based application development via it’s web-based IDE, and provides automatic scalability for your apps. In other words you dont really need to have your backend of web and app servers to take care off. There is lot more to BungeeConnect in terms of its OOP language BungeeLogic about which i will start writing in near future.
Now as to who might be actually competing with BungeeLabs. Well, Salesforce does compete in some terms with its Force.com venture. However the path to getting started and finally releasing an app with Force.com is so convoluted that you can do a PhD thesis on it. Anyway, for the actual application development in Force.com, you need to download a plugin(?) for Eclipse. Now this is something you dont have to do in BungeeConnect since they have a free to use and build web-based IDE.
Who else might be competing? Microsoft would be another good candidate with it’s Popfly venture. Having said that, Popfly competes mostly in concept but comes nowhere near the end-end feature set and integration offered by BungeeConnect. If there was a good integration of Popfly Concept + Visual Studio + SilverLight, that would have been the best competing product out there. However as things stand right now, it would be another 2 years before Microsoft reaches that spot.
Competition aside, Techcrunch claims that BungeeConnect is for “small-to-medium business market”. That is again not exactly true, since we are developing our social web application on BungeeConnect, and we dont think we are in the “small-to-medium business market”. In fact you can use BungeeConnect to develop apps for Facebook and other social platforms. As part of our PoC of BungeeConnect, we did an Facebook app in December. You can check it out at - http://apps.facebook.com/i-recommend
More on all the above soon.
As a side note, according to Venturebeat’s another post, iSkoot competes with Mig33. Again, i dont think that is a correct statement. iSkoot is a mobile VoIP company, while Mig33 is mobile chat+social networking company which also offer lower price point calling features that in technical terms can be similar to a calling card offering. iSkoot competing to with Fring, EQO, and Nimbuzz would be the correct statement.
Update 1: Heroku is a potential competitor for BungeeConnect. Heroku is RoR On-Demand enabler. Which means you get to deal with all the plus and minuses of RoR.
on March 16th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Heroku leverages the large ecosystem of the Ruby community, which has grown organically for several years, and has a large third party constituency.
Bungee is just starting on a very difficult path to blaze out support for new language, and a very complex binding and control model. It is an exciting product, but after viewing all of their remedial videos, I can only conclude they have a herculean task ahead.
Bungee had better get a handle on the educational side of this issue, otherwise, more mature and settled development systems with hard-won history will migrate towards the hosted model and wipe them out in a matter of months.
It is very hard to gain mind share for developers. Start with a detailed professionally compiled set of instructional video and well authored books. The current videos are almost comedic, sorry guys. So many things are glossed over and an otherwise experienced person can only say, ‘whaaa?”
on March 16th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Maybe ‘comedic’ is too strong. I meant that the videos and screencasts are just so obviously incomplete that I chuckled at a few. As a technical training and publishing consultant, I know how difficult it is to create a large body of training for a complex and paradigm shifting product.
on March 16th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
@Alan:
Hey, thanks for your well-articulated points and advice, as well as the clarification on what you meant by “comedic.”
I take to heart your assertion that well-established development platforms with large communities could quickly overtake Bungee Connect unless we better articulate our technology. I happen to be the guy who currently heads up Bungee Labs’ educational efforts, and I’m working on a large overhaul that I hope will do this much better.
If you are willing, I’d very much like to know which videos you watched. You can get in touch with me as “ted” at bungeelabs - com.
on March 17th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
I would argue that DabbleDB doesn’t compete with BungeeConnect at all - in fact the two complement eachother quite well.
Dabble provides an extremely rapid, user friendly, web-based database schema designer (so good most users wouldn’t know they just designed a database schema) with, among other features, a solid web API.
BungeeConnect, on the other hand (for those who haven’t yet experienced it) provides an amazing IDE for developing web application UIs, but relies almost exclusively on the consumption of Web APIs for content.
on March 18th, 2008 at 5:09 am
I guess James you have not started playing around with MySQL databases inside of Bungeelabs.
on March 18th, 2008 at 11:02 am
I guess, Vivek, you haven’t built a Dabble DB yet.
I applaud BungeeLabs for building the MySQL connector, but, compared to DabbleDB or Ruby on Rails’ ActiveRecord, Bungee’s MySQL implementation is, well, clunky.
on March 18th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Trust me, no web20 app escapes my eye. While DabbleDB is a great app(so is Trackvia, and few more), i could never define a use for the app. Maybe it is not for everyone. Or maybe they are so fixated on solving a problem which everyone does not face.
As for ActiveRecod whatever, dont even talk about that. That is one heck of a cryptic way to write your code. As compared to that, Bungee code comes out lot cleaner and easier to read and maintain.
on March 18th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
I have not actually coded anything yet, just read the docs and watched the videos, but Bungee’s binding model seems convoluted, at the very least, the explanations are murky. Maybe I’m just out of practice.
on March 18th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
I think it would be wise for everyone to withhold judgment unit the framework get s a decent vetting in the wild. As for rails active record, there are so many helper classes, that even folks like me that dont fully understand each facet, can usually bungle into some workable solution.
That heroku looks like a winner, though; it will be tough to compete against the head start.
on March 21st, 2008 at 10:51 am
Quick error check from the post -
“Anyway, for the actual application development in Force.com, you need to download a plugin(?) for Eclipse.”
That isn’t true, and much of app dev on Force.com happens without Eclipse, and directly through our browser based tools. The Eclipse piece there to help provide rich code editors for those who optionally choose to use them.