Apsona is an application for creating online databases very rapidly. Starting with a data source (typically a CSV file), it lets you create the database and maintain relationships among the data records, while providing an easy-to-use UI. This also enables easy querying and reporting off the data.
Apsona makes very few assumptions about the data — it is driven completely by the metadata (information about the names and types of your data fields). So you can use it for creating a wide range of custom systems, ranging from simple lead management to insurance, real estate, project management and CRM.
When creating an Apsona application, you typically start with CSV data, but not necessarily so. It is possible to customize an Apsona application to use your own database for its back end. With this approach, you can “bolt on” the Apsona user interface and feature set on any database. You can even create multiple Apsona applications, all of which talk to one database — for instance, your operations personnel can see a detailed user interface while your executives can see a summary.
Apsona’s technology is JavaScript and Ajax on the front end, and a pure JSON data service on the back end. The Ajax front end makes it responsive enough to give it a desktop-like feel, while the JSON back end enables web services to be built around it very easily. The back end is implemented using Rhino, a JavaScript interpreter that runs inside the Java virtual machine.