Welcoming Gabriel

Those of you who visit this site directly might notice a new face in the sidebar. Although we have Lockworld to thank for some great posts about ZC and we were hoping to see more, Doug recently let it be known he was having difficulty finding time to post. Hence we invited a new face to LoZC and the face accepted — please welcome Gabriel Coch!

I’ll let Gabriel introduce himself through his own introductory post but I will point out that he’s one of those rare folk who combine technical acumen, business savvy, and a genuine desire to help people not only improve their daily lives through technology but also safeguard their communities.

In addition, Gabriel and I have been exploring over email and a couple phone conversations how we (we meaning us and YOU) can take ZC’s potential as a commercial business platform to “the next level”…though what that next level looks like is frankly unknown at this point. Part of Gabriel’s motivation for joining us, if I can presume to speak for him for just a moment, is to further this idea by harnessing a real ZC community.

I’m excited and hope you are too!

Zynd in the Clowns

Awhile back someone in the Zoho Creator forum asked how to best design a ZC application and I wrote back to the effect that since there isn’t much design involved, it’s best just to suffer through the documentation and play with the interface until you get something close to what you thought you wanted. I’ll now amend that sentiment slightly by stating that it can’t hurt at least to try and write Deluge code that does not induce nausea.

Version 0.01 of Zyndafeed used a kludgy series of shows and hides in conjunction with 50 statically defined form fields to support up to 50 photo uploads. This worked OK from the outside but the implementation is embarrassing and in any case prompting the user with the option to fill out up to 50 text fields on one page is probably ridiculous in the first place.

Version 0.02 takes a different approach (and reduces signficantly the size of our Deluge script) by providing a separate form devoted to image uploads. A one-listing-to-many-photos relationship is established by inserting a listing’s unique_id as a non-unique identifier for rows in the Photos table. When it comes time to generate the feed, any image in the Photos table with a listing id that matches a listing’s unique id gets appended as a a child node. With this change not only are we providing Ted and the BuggyRocket customers with more flexibility (remember that we need to support at least 25 uploads per listing) but we’re also adhering closer to the DRY principle.

Design considerations when hacking out a Zoho application? It can’t hurt. In any case we’ll see what Mark thinks of this new version when he gets a chance to try it out and reply. Some ideas for more features include a monolithic view of listing data instead of views spread over 5 separate screens and some useful filters on whatever views are in place.

Introducing ZCrIS

Zoho Creator Information Services (ZCrIS) is an experimental mail filter intended for Zoho Creator applications that need read/write access to various external web services.

As a trivial example of ZCrIS’ possible uses I’ve created a simple zip code checker for the United States. It’s a public ZC application; a quick look at how it’s put together plus a reminder from ZC Quicktip #1 posted at the end of October should give you some idea of how it’s working.

In essence a Zoho Creator application sends email to ZCrIS@landofzohocreator.com and indirectly reads from or writes to one or more external web services. ZCrIS receives the email your application sends, does your bidding, and sends the response data right back to your application, you guessed it, over email.

Documentation and more plugins will surface if there’s enough interest. Source code for ZCrIS itself is available at googlecode.com.

Please report any bugs and of course feel free to repurpose the basic ZCrIS code for your own particular needs.

Incidentally, for our own purposes we’re going to be using ZCrIS to post some real estate content up to Oodle in the next installment of our BuggyRocket series.

(ZCrIS’ pneumatic message cylinder was rendered at buttongenerator.com)