Teqlo to let users assemble Web applications

Jeff Nolan left SAP about a month ago, and I have been waiting for him to resurface. He turned up at Teqlo (formerly Abgenial Systems), which is building a development environment for assembling applications from Web services and a runtime environment for hosting and managing applications. Users can invite their others to use their applications via the Teqlo service. "With Teqlo the users are intimately involved because they are the developer," Jeff said in his blog post. He further describes Teqlo, funded by Leapfrog Ventures, in the following FAQ: 

Q: What is Teqlo?

A: Teqlo the company is committed to the vision that users should beable to assemble functional web applications without having to knowhow to program. The applications, called “Teqlos”, are assembled out of readily available web services. These services, called “Teqlets”, have a service wrapper around them that semantically normalizes web services by expressing inputs/outputs as microformats and then subjecting them to a routing algorithm that determines the proper sequencing of the services in order to create an application.

Q: Wait a minute, how do you determine the “sequencing”?

A: Traditional programming using a flow-of-control model where application  components are strung together and hardwired by developers. Do this, then this, then this, if error condition then do this. Teqlos follow a data flow model of sequencing that is roughly analogous to the internet itself with each Teqlo having a starting state and a successful completion state, and the Teqlo infrastructure determines the appropriate path to link the services together by routing data to each service based on what it is asking for and producing. The reason the internet is reliable and scalable is that each packet doesn’t have to have a predetermined path to completion,the routing infrastructure of the internet detemines it as it is delivering the packet.

Q: Teqlos are built up from Teqlets, but you don’t have many Teqlets available yet. How long will it be before I have the services I want.

A: The preview version of Teqlo.com is certainly not a finished product, in  act aside from demonstrating the concept in a functional system we do no  expect that you will be productive in this release.The top three priorities we have are to 1) finish the development environment and APIs so that anyone can develop their own Teqlets, 2)enhance the runtime environmen  to be more user friendly and reliable, and 3) build out the Teqlet library.

Q: If I build a Teqlo, who owns it?
A: You do. The publishing process permits you 3 levels of state with public being wide open, private being only for you, and groupenabling the invite process.

Q: If I build a Teqlet, who owns it?

A: You do. While we are encouraging the development of public Teqlets, we have a licensing model that enable Teqlet developers tolicense their Teqlets.

Q: Will Teqlos run outside of Teqlo.com?

A: No, but this is something we are working on.