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.

Online Forms: Everybody’s Doing It

A post over at the Google Docs blog describes a new form creation feature, Stop sharing spreadsheets, start collecting information:

…in some cases, you want to collect just a tiny bit of information from dozens, scores, or even hundreds of users or more. Some of them are Google Docs users. Some of them are not. Either way, you don’t always want them all mucking around with the whole spreadsheet and you’re tired of telling those new to Google Docs that they don’t need to switch to Gmail just to use Docs (huh? you didn’t know that either?).

We’re really excited to bring you forms! Create a form in a Google Docs spreadsheet and send it out to anyone with an email address. They won’t need to sign in, and they can respond directly from the email message or from an automatically generated web page. Creating the form is easy: start with a spreadsheet to get the form, or start by creating the form and you’ll get the spreadsheet automatically.

Reading the entire post left me thinking of blist, DabbleDB, EditGrid, Smartsheet, Wufoo, and Zoho Creator. It must be at least a little disappointing for the smaller outfits in that list to see Google Docs generating similar technology in-house. Then again maybe this fact is just “validation of the model” as some like to say. Since Zoho Creator is really a project inside the much larger AdventNet I’m not sure its team would care much and in any case the unique thing that Zoho Creator brings to the table is that it has a GUI form builder but also an accompanying scripting language. Sites like EditGrid and Wufoo have great user interfaces, AppJet is doing great things with scripting on the web, but the hybrid approach might be entirely unique to Zoho Creator.

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…

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.

“Webification”, Brought to You by Open Source

Today LongJump Blog published two posts that together do a nice job of indirectly highlighting the subtle connection we have today between open source and situated web application platforms (SWAPs):

Is Open Source An Option for Small Business?

Because most open source applications are built by unpaid volunteers, bug fixes or complex features are sometimes not a priority. Most small business are better off using a reliable, world-class business application suite they can depend on

Webification and LongJump

…only recently have small businesses began to focus on leveraging web applications to take their business to the next level.

When I first read the post about open source my immediate reaction was to think blatant FUD but on close reading decided it’s a fairly accurate post, at least from the high level and brief attention with which it approaches the subject. Open source does often require relatively complex setup and will frequently exhibit bugs you can’t reliably expect to be fixed in the time you require. The resource limitations typical of small businesses can make these drawbacks particularly unattractive, even more unattractive today as we find more and more business software alternatives appearing in our web browsers.

The cool thing about this trend is that open source undergirds so many facets of the SWAP landscape we survey today. I can’t speak too much about the internal software choices of these companies of course but if you take a look at the web server identifiers of the software delivering your LongJump, Coghead, DabbleDB, and Zoho Creator content to your screen, you’ll see the word Apache staring back at you. And ZC in particular incorporates JFreeChart and javacc into its offering. Doubtless most companies offering a SWAP-like product are incorporating lots of open source software to deliver their functionality.

So while the direct employment of open source has definite drawbacks for small businesses trying to succeed with technology, as more of them gravitate to the applications implemented on a SWAP, they are unknowingly reliant on open source technology perhaps more than ever.