Land of Zoho Creator

One possible indictment of the online application development (OAD) model is that by virtue of choosing a single vendor to provide you with a development environment and to host your applications (e.g., Zoho/AdventNet, Wufoo, Dabble DB, Coghead, Ning, etc.) you are putting all of your eggs in one basket. If a company’s site were to suddenly “go dark” for whatever reason and not quickly come back online, you and your data would be in jeopardy — potentially resulting in angry customers, broken web sites, and lost revenue.

Even though at this point I would venture a guess that the OAD sites targeting small and medium-sized businesses have not produced many mission-critical applications (with the possible exception of Salesforce), given the recent power outage in San Francisco affecting some high profile sites, as OAD becomes more commonplace such an unpleasant scenario for a SMB is not at all hard to imagine.

One obvious way to address this problem is to manually or automatically perform periodic backups of your online application’s data. You could do this any number of ways but all would probably reduce to some version of either manually clicking through the process in your own browser or writing then periodically running a small script from your local workstation or host. The latter could be automated so that it ran once a day, once a week, or whatever.

Another quick solution would be to periodically transfer the data from one OAD vendor to another, potentially automating this process too, once you had the time to develop the script to do it. This approach might even have the added advantage of providing your users with some cheap redundancy in that if, say, Zoho’s grid was having issues and was not acessible for a period of time, you could temporarily redirect your users to their data residing at your Dabble DB URL.

A quick example at Zoho Creator shows a Contact List application where a few contacts are stored. A short screencast shows how you might backup the data to Dabble DB. In essence it demonstrates how you can quickly create a new Dabble DB application based on the comma separated value (CSV) export of any ZC application.:

This was just a quick proof-of-concept demo, there’s obviously some room for automation here, and maybe even a page with some JavaScript that could embed your ZC application unless it detected an inability to do so, switching over to the Dabble DB application instead. If LoZC revisits this issue in the future, maybe we can present a more robust demonstration.