Californian startup Espresso Logic has been given $1.6 million by investors who believe the backend service provider can create the "executable napkin". Espresso Logic also promises to make using SQL databases as simple as NoSQL, CEO R. Paul Singh told ProgrammableWeb after the funding announcement.

At the heart of the startup's market advantage is their approach to reactive programming. "It's not really new, it's been around for a few years", said Singh. "But nobody has really applied it to the backend database programming. For example, a simple bill of materials explosion project could take between 300-500 lines of code. We show how to do the same thing in 4-5 statements."

Espresso Logic believes their service and its' reduced coding environment can, ultimately, change the relationship between the developer and business side of an enterprise.

Singh explains: "From the developers' perspective, their biggest problem is the sense that the business people can't make up their minds, so the specifications for a project keeps changing, which in turn requires rewriting of all these lines of code. Now you can improve the language between the developer and the business side so they can all look at the one document and know what each is doing. It's the 'executable napkin' idea: you could feed the specification drafted on the back of a napkin into Espresso Logic and you can literally get the result you are after."

Singh says the Espresso Logic model walks developers through four steps:

"First, you create a RESTful interface for your SQL database. Or you can point your database to us and we create a RESTful API in the background with all the parameters included immediately. This can be done for single or multiple tables with the same ease. "Next, you point and click on the security settings which can be done based on roles or role and column level. For example, you might not want to have your sales reps in one area not able to access data of what a sales rep in another area is doing. With Espresso Logic, you don't need to build individual views for individual users. "Third, you can use the reactive model we provide, or use Javascript, to create the business logic layer, or you can mix and match a combination of our model and Javascript as much as you like. "Finally we give you a testing and debugging tool so that you can test your program before making it public."

Singh provides a typical example of a manufacturing planning application use case, providing read-write access to large business databases via an app created with Espresso Logic. The app may define decision-making processes for many different If.. Then.. Else scenarios.

"With Espresso Logic's reactive programming model, app creators can develop this product with a lot less resources," Singh said.

With realtime response management and the capacity to manage large datasets in an app on the platform, it will be interesting to watch if Espresso Logic's platform could be useful to implement the automated IoT-driven manufacturing, logistics, and smart cities solutions expected to be able to be created thanks to the widening proliferation of sensors, devices, and big data.