Ragic wants to make building enterprise Web applications as quick and easy as the world have been using spreadsheet today.
We're not the first team trying to build a database system that works like a spreadsheet. It's a reasonable step forward as spreadsheets are so intuitive and popular with business users, because on the other side, implementing enterprise applications is such a painful process.
But this seemingly not-so-far-away step is quite big, because of the fundamental differences between spreadsheets and databases: one is a simple flat file, and the other is a much more complex data storage built for searches and programmatic access. To build such a solution, one must bridge the differences between a super flexible spreadsheet interface and the not-so-flexible database systems. At the same time be powerful enough to satisfy reasonably complex business requirements.
Most approaches, spreadsheet interface or not, fell short when dealing with more complex data structures. Like master-detail representation, and dealing with many-to-many relationships, they either simply can't deal with them, or has a way too complicated way to do them.
Ragic did not begin with a spreadsheet interface, but with a super flexible data structure that's also stored in a database. Our data structure allows users to freely create forms containing multiple details, link entries from different forms without caring about how database tables should be designed, or whether it's one-to-many or many-to-many.
After a while, we've found that business users love and understand spreadsheets so much, it's actually the perfect design interface for a database application. And the super flexible data structure Ragic has happens to be just the right tool to bridge the gap between the flexibility of spreadsheets and database systems.
After a few more years (yes, it's much harder than one would expect), here we are with Ragic Builder, the Light Development tool to quickly and easy build DB applications. Ready to make the lives of millions of developers out there a lot better.
