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Zoho Creator
Unlike word processors or wikis, I haven't seen a flood of free Web sites for building database-driven applications. The few other database entries I'd tried were generally either limited, expensive or cumbersome. But not Zoho Creator.

Zoho Creator sports a surprisingly easy interface for creating your own apps -- even those that include some table joins (that is, looking up information in one table for use in another, which helps put the "relational" in relational databases). With a few drag-and-drops, I quickly created data entry forms with text fields, drop-down lists, text boxes and so on.

There's a drag-and-drop option for adding a "lookup" field that pulls selections from another table. It's likewise fairly easy to set up different views of your data, and user-by-user access to each view and form. Creator also offers drag-and-drop scripting, allowing such things as setting defaults or variables based on certain conditions, sending out autogenerated e-mails when a field is changed in a specific way, or validating user input.

Zoho Creator lets you add scripts by dragging and dropping. (Click for larger view.)

For more sophisticated scripting, it's easy to click back and forth between drag-and-drop scripting and the actual code. And I quickly downloaded data from Zoho Creator onto my own system for backup in varying formats, such as comma-separated or XLS spreadsheet format (although, alas, not in SQL) -- a must for any Web-based application where I'm storing important data.

I showed some of my colleagues the sample story-tracking app I put together on Creator, and response was highly favorable. I can think of many real-world uses for Creator, from detailed story tracking in our newsroom to keeping the list of who's slated to buy Friday morning donuts (making it simple to see who hasn't bought their share and even set up automated e-mail notifications when the list is changed). If you're a fan of structured data on the Web, both available to the public at large and shared with a select list of friends or colleagues, Zoho Creator is definitely worth a look.

Be aware that if you're a true database geek, Zoho Creator isn't a replacement for coding your own database app with something like PHP, Python or Ruby, and MySQL or PostgreSQL. Page layouts are limited (there are two, with no style customizations), and you can't do everything with variables, conditional scripting or sophisticated table joins that you can when coding from scratch. (I was told, for example, that I couldn't use a variable value as part of the name of my view.)

You can embed Zoho Creator applications in your own Web pages, although if you decide to use the apps at Zoho.com, you can't do things such as redirect users to a specific view after they've filled out a form. (They just get a message saying data was successfully submitted, followed by a new blank form.)

I find it occasionally frustrating that Zoho Creator uses its own scripting language, Deluge, requiring yet another new syntax to learn if I want to build functionality that goes beyond drag-and-drop offerings. For example, while it's easy to set up autogenerated mail to a specific hard-coded e-mail address, it took me several hours of poking around and document reading to figure out how to do so based on varying conditions. There's some documentation on Deluge at zoho.com but not too many other places to turn. (Note: Power users might want to check out a blog started recently by several Zoho Creator users, Land of ZC.)

See the tiny pencil icon? That's how you edit a listing in a Zoho Creator app. (Click for larger view.)

And while most of the application is intuitive, some things are not, such as how to store a "collection" of records and even how to edit existing records (a puzzle shared by several of my colleagues, although easy to use once we found it -- a barely noticeable pencil icon next to records in a view).

Fortunately, though, the Zoho staff is quite responsive about answering questions, even from customers with free accounts. Some of the written responses can be a bit difficult to understand, but they're generally useful. In one case, someone even built me a sample application to demonstrate how to conditionally pull data from one table into another.

Zoho.com has a slew of other offerings, including word processing, spreadsheets, wikis, project management, "notebooks" and Web conferencing, although so far I've stuck with Creator. Many of the other apps, including the Google Docs competitors Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet, are quite feature-packed, but too much at the expense of elegant UI for my tastes.

Earlier this month, Zoho announced a private beta of Zoho Business, a pay service that will include a companywide administrative console, telephone support and "co-branding." For now, most of the services are free, and the plan is to keep them so for individual use. I expect I'll be building some real apps on the site soon.

Cheers

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