Tips from the Iceberg

I haven’t actually used Iceberg yet but have been keeping an eye on it and staying apprised via their email list since ReadWriteWeb first published an overview last year. This week I noticed they announced a major launch and are now officially supporting all manner of free and paid user accounts.

So since my interest in Iceberg feeds into a more general interest in getting the various web platforms out there talking to one another, I asked Wayne Byrne over email for some details regarding interoperability and here are the points he shared:

1. You can export any view to excel
2. You can get any web app to send data into iceberg using web services
3. Iceberg can make calls out to any app that has an api (like google, amazon, basecamp etc)
4. Oh and since iceberg makes a regular sql server database people can integrate right into the database itself

Note that Iceberg has two “versions”, hosted and local, and I think point 4 above relates to the local Windows-only desktop version while the hosted version implements a flash-based interface for users.

With Icerberg’s ability to issue outbound requests to the web I can see some interesting possibilities for integration via the Zoho Creator API and perhaps even a possibility to use an off-line desktop application developed with Iceberg that could periodically synch with an online Zoho Creator application.

Once I get familiar with the flash interface and can actually develop something that works I’ll try to post a simple demo illustrating integration with ZC.

Wufoo Themes meet Zoho Creator Forms

ZC2WF can render most Zoho Creator forms using any of Wufoo’s 50 CSS themes. Here are a few examples using some forms from Zoho Creator’s Sample Applications:

• post profile Modern Office theme, redirects to itself
• New Recipient Firenze theme, redirects to itself
• Add Donations Pistachio theme, redirects to itself
• Add New Donor Garden Pool theme, redirects to a Red Cross page

I say “most” forms because the service uses a modified version of Zoho Creator’s JavaScript Client API which means it won’t render any File Upload fields (since the Client API itself does not support these) and any client-side Deluge scripting (including the hiding and showing of fields) set up within the “native” ZC form won’t be available in this skinned version of the form.

Another current limitation is that although Wufoo themes have great support for instructions per-field to help the user, Zoho Creator doesn’t include its instructions for the user in the JSON export of its form definitions. If the ZC team can add this info to the export, I’ll happily add it to the service.

Here’s a zip archive of the relevant files, they can be hosted anywhere without too much hassle. Feel free to experiment with your own forms and I’ll post here as more features become available.

Update: I notice the calendar pop-ups aren’t working in Safari and Opera. I’ll fix that soon…

Zoho Creator API is Here

The Zoho Creator blog recently announced the availability of a programming interface into Zoho Creator. Users can now develop applications for their own web sites using Zoho’s database without being limited by Zoho Creator’s user interface and look-and feel. Or, as the post puts it:

With this users can now build their web application in PHP, JSP, ASP, Perl or any other programming language while the data is stored in Zoho Creator.

And for those who will be writing to the API, there is this interesting note from the docs:

…both HTTP GET and HTTP POST calling convention is used. REST API’s with GET method provides a flexible way for sending HTTP requests. Add,Delete and Update operations modifies the state of the database. Hence such operations should not be done in GET method, for production purpose. However the GET method is very easy for testing.

Technically speaking, developers who do this kind of work aren’t supposed to use GET web requests to write data (the same kind of requests our browsers use when we request a web page) but my guess is that many users will “abuse” this testing feature, choosing to leave it in their production applications because it makes for simpler JavaScript.