Cohesion can extract all of the meta-data from a relational database of any size and with the addition of a few supporting tables can provide a complete database viewing/editing/reporting interface with strong roll-based security. By adding additional domain specific reports and tools that incorporate the required business rules, a complete application can be developed that can run on a laptop or be deployed on a cluster.

Cohesion Technology is a proprietary framework with over a decade of active development. Written by a single person it uses a consistent API and well-defined patterns.

The principle project goals were:

  1. Strong Security
  2. High Performance
  3. Tight Database Coupling

Secondary goals included:

  1. Code Generation
  2. Reduced Maintenance
  3. Database Reporting
  4. Database Forms

Over time new features have been added:

  1. Type-safe Query Syntax
  2. Multiple Databases
  3. Responsive Design
  4. HTML 5

Cohesion has never been offered as a product, it is just a very large set of tools that Entraspan can leverage for large database driven web-based applications.

Code generation is a good technique when generating static classes from a database, but it goes both ways allowing class changes to be pushed into the database.
A modular architecture provides a core set of services like user authentication and roll-based security along with business domain specific modules.
Cache is the secret to performance, CPU, disk, web browsers all use cache. Cohesion uses write-through caching for high-performance and fast updates.
A growing problem over time is the number of embedded queries in application code, Cohesion uses a compile-time checked query syntax that is in some ways similar to how Grails queries are constructed.
A database symbolic name is associated with generated classes which is used to find a database provider at run-time, making it pretty seamless to mix classes from separate systems.
Security built-in as a top 3 requirement, not as an afterthought.
Tight coupling means that good database design is immediately reflected in the quality of the class library that is generated from the schema, including all the meta data, tables, indexes, and relationships.
The Cohesion reporting tool is used to page through thousands of records of data in the most efficient way possible. It also includes direct exporting to excel and row editing.
The Cohesion editor brings together the database meta data along with role based security and smart handling of data fields based on their data types and relations.