Tips from the Iceberg
May 1, 2008I 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:
- You can export any view to excel
- You can get any web app to send data into iceberg using web services
- Iceberg can make calls out to any app that has an api (like google, amazon, basecamp etc)
- 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.
