Proactive on Reactive - Espresso Logic gets funded, launches industry first reactive backend as a service
Towards the beginning of the year, Netflix shared how it had reworked its client-server interaction model, where one of the key building blocks was Microsoft's open-source Reactive Extensions library. The blog post spoke about how “The Reactive Extensions library models each event as a collection of data rather than a series of callbacks. This is a revolutionary idea, because once you model an event as a collection you can transform events in much the same way you might transform in-memory collections.” Facebook Engineer Stoyan Stefanov also spoke about how the social media giant is leveraging Reactive Programming – “React lets you build your application using components that know how to render some data. When data changes, components update automatically in a very efficient way, only where necessary. And all the job of attaching and detaching event handlers is taken care of for you. Also efficiently - using delegation.”
Reactiveness is catching attention due to the need for event-driven, scalable, and interactive architectures on the server and the client. Cashing in on this trend is Reactive Programming startup - Espresso Logic, which recently announced a $1.6M funding for its industry first Backend as a Service. Inventus Capital led the funding along with angel investors including Raju Reddy (advisor Hitachi Systems), Lee Nackman (previously with IBM, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft), Gokul Rajaram (Square, Facebook, Google) and Anurag Jain (previously with Dell). According to R. Paul Singh, CEO of Espresso Logic – “We will be expanding our engineering and business teams. We are using this capital to continue to develop list of features many of our prospects have asked for (i.e more investment in engineering). In addition, we are making investments in marketing and sales to increase our reach.”
Espresso provides an instant RESTful server for developers to connect web and mobile applications to external databases including MySQL, Oracle Server and Microsoft SQL Server. Enterprise developers can use Espresso to securely manage access to database rows and columns based on individual roles. Key benefits are the ability to create RESTful server for SQL database in minutes versus days, create enterprise class API in minutes for exposing corporate database and allow Excel or Google Docs users to access SQL databases in real-time. Talking about these benefits, Singh said, “API management is gaining momentum, but until now creating APIs has been a complex process. Espresso provides a system that enables developers to create APIs from existing databases along with business logic and declarative security at an unbelievably fast rate. Because our technology is based on standards such as REST, JSON and JavaScript, it’s ideally suited for mobile developers looking to shorten the development time of their business applications.”
While Espresso Logic is based in Santa Clara, Singh believes that the solutions are extremely relevant for Indian developers as well – “This technology can help any programmer in India. Initially integrators that want to sell value to their customers while building web and mobile apps rather than time and material will adopt this and win business from their competitors. In the long run, every software development house whether developing products for India or for US or Europe will adopt our or similar solutions.”