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…

ZC SkyServer

Goal:

Manipulate images through a Web service and save them.

Ideas:

The example application wraps around the SDSS’s Image Cutout service to provide a way to search for and save images throughout the known universe.

The user can pick a famous landmark as a starting point, add various tools and markers to the image, pan to other locations, zoom in and out, and save the image for later reference. Here are a couple quick examples:

Blabber:

This application is really just a wrapper around a mechanism for varying the GET requests to the skyserver and a facility for saving the images thus created. The SDSS provides a lot of its own interfaces and tools (worth checking out) so it’s best to think of this ZC application as a simplified user interface to basic images, plus a facility for saving those images.

In creating this application a few limitations in the current Zoho Creator interface came up that presented some challenges:

• page real estate: Lack of support for more than two columns in a form can require users with smaller screens or browser dimensions to scroll a lot.
• page format hacks: Limitations in mark-up tools required a few hacks to insert HTML via Deluge plaintext fields (”Add Notes” in the graphical editor). This may not even be supported in the future as the XSS vulnerabilities are fixed.
• form reloads and browser state: Reloading the form can sometimes lead to unexpected behavior. If you reload the ZC SkyServer page in your browser after picking some options, you may get an unexpected image or a form state that no longer accurately represents the image you’re viewing.

Once Zoho Creator supports its own API there will be room to create our own interfaces to utilize the services it provides. Until that time it takes some effort but you can usually still manage to present the form fields you need, even if the result is not the most elegant.

In case you would like to create your own version of this app, you can download the SDSS data loaded into the locations form as a comma-delimited file.

Related Links:

Sloan Digital Sky Survey

ZC Weirdness (potential bugs in the system):

There was initially an issue with Internet Explorer and the Decision Checkboxes used in the form but it was quickly resolved thanks to another example of great support from the ZC team.