It seems such quantity of potential users should be of a great interest for VAR, Solution Providers or Individual developers, but I can hardly believe anybody builds a profitable business on that.
My concern is it’s difficult to call it a marketplace at this stage. I mean just 200 requests (I followed the link you cited) sound not very promising comparing it to 300 000 user base if anybody wants to build a profitable business on this marketplace, doesn't it?
AND WY I AM SO ADDICTED TO ZC?Yes, we have limited some of the features in Free plan, reason being that we want to run the show so that small and medium business owners with an idea can create apps at low price and manage their business. Now we have introduced 3 user plan at $15 targeted to smallest business owners and home-based businesses. Marketplace is one of the kind of initiative where in business owners can buy apps from third party developers -or- get a custom made app by the developers at reasonable price.
1º Because this tool is simple and easy to learn and, because of that, it is also easy to explain to non-developers how to setup things;
3º Because ZC have a free plan (despite the increasing of limitations);
And finally, i start to understand some programming logic and i started to make some progresses in coding... could you imagine that?!?!?!The reason behind designing the contextual linking to Script Tab from 'Form/ View' tab is this. We wanted to introduce 'Deluge Script' at slow pace giving users time and flexibility to run their hands on it. Further splitting Script Tab into two - Script Builder (for novice scriptwriters) and Free Flow Scripting (for advance scriptwriters) makes it easier for them to get accustomed to Deluge Script quickly. Guess we have succeeded.
Because of the dynamic of this forum, and some advanced users: Several shared doubts are posted, and we always have an answer, almost of the times with code examples. And the best part is that we can grant permissions to developers for helping us... (Thanks ZC team, Binarysprinter and Scriptlogic ;)).Truly, they are the superstars in Zoho Creator Forum, helping users with the tips and tricks and offering solutions for user requirements at Zoho Marketplace. Thank you Binarysprinter and Gaev
Unexpected things do happen at the most odd of times and I guess in life we have to handle all these unexpected situations.
One such thing happened to one of the Zoho Creator user - Alan Bradford, last week. His wife was hit by a driver when she was traveling back home from the gym. The driver was DRUNK!. Luckily she was not hurt. But the car has got hit very badly and Alan says that the repair works would cost $13,000 dollars.
You might think what this has to do with Zoho.
Since there were no broken bones, and everybody (surprisingly) had insurance, we decided to try to get through this on our own. While I was on hold with the insurance company the next morning, I logged into my Zoho Creator account and built an application for us to manage all the details related to the accident. It took me about an hour to build it. You can demo and download my Accident Tracker application in the Creator Marketplace
However, this action of Alan perfectly mirrors the aspect of his strong personality. Alan, our best wishes are with you and your wife. Hope she recovers out of this emotional trauma soon.
Alan Bradford has blogged about this incident in detail here.
Well, its three weeks since we officially launched Zoho Marketplace. We are glad to see Marketplace being active almost on all days, can see new projects being posted even on the weekends and developers responding to it.
Here is the stats of Zoho Marketplace (as on 22nd Oct):
But wait! That’s not all we have to share with you.
Have an interesting success story to share. Poul Tang, a consultant posted his requirement at the Marketplace and recieved solution from Pascal in few days. Well, Pascal Veilleux is the featured Zoho Creator Partner. Check out his developer profile.
What makes this story interesting is that Poul got three proposals from the developers and he finalized on one to get his things done. He used PayPal service for the payment. Entire process was completed in couple of days. Read the full story here »
We’ve scheduled a maintenance for Zoho Creator from Friday Sep 19th, 23:00 hrs --to-- Saturday Sep 20th, 03:00 hrs PDT. Friday Sep 26th, 23:00 hrs --to-- Saturday Sep 27th, 03:00 hrs PDT. During this period access to Zoho Creator will not be available.
We apologize for any inconveniences this may cause. We appreciate your patience in this regard.
UPDATE: The scheduled maintenance has been postponed to Sep 26th 2008 as we found some unforeseen errors at the last minute. Kindly excuse for the inconvenience caused.
After Suganya on Deluge Script and Sriram on Infrastructure, Security. Charles will be interviewed by Pete Thomas at 'Land of Zoho Creator'. Charles is Zoho Creator's Chief Engineer. A very energetic and enthusiastic guy, he is responsible for the entire back-end development which involves feature planning, development and release.
Pete has posted few topics which Charles will be answering. Here's your chance to get know about Zoho Creator's current features, upcoming features and whatever you wanted to know about the service.
You might also want to know what keeps him on his toes, NO......not for being alert or active but unable to be at his desk for long ;)
I am really excited to see Alan Bradford and LockWorld contributing to 'Land of Zoho Creator'. So, you can expect good variety in the coming days. 'Land of Zoho Creator' was started a month ago by a passionate user, fan and a well wisher of Zoho Creator - Pete Thomas. Since then he has been exploring Zoho Creator deep into its very root and is coming out with many intelligent apps.
Alan Bradford writes interesting stuff (technology, education, and business) at his blog: Big Ugly Couch. He was the key person who dug-up and suggested Zoho Creator to K. Hovnanian® Homes™ for its business use. We have the case study on K. Hovnanian® Homes™ here.
Lockworld, a web surfer, provides some useful technical tips for the web entrepreneur at his site The Web for you. He blew our mind away by setting up the PayPal-integrated product catalog using Zoho Creator.
With Pete Thomas + Alan Bradford + Lockworld, I am sure 'Land of Zoho Creator' is going to be an informative and fun place to visit for all the Zoho Creators.
Get going guys, our best wishes are with you!
Sriram, Zoho Creator's Lead Architect has given an interesting interview (well I shouldn’t say… go check it out for yourself) and a nice peek into Zoho Creator's Infrastructure, Security and more...
Here are some interesting tidbits from the interview:
ZohoCreator is completely based on relational model and Deluge was a natural fit. Gradually when we integrated Deluge, ZohoCreator transformed from a simple Form Builder to a complete Online Database Application creator.
Migrating ZohoCreator to the Grid Environment was a huge effort. Some part of the data model for the ZohoCreator had to be modified. Especially with regards to sharing. With a standalone service, there is only one database and all the users data resides in one database. Whereas in a database cluster the user information is distributed across the clusters.
The performance aspect of ZohoCreator is bit unique among all other Zoho services. ZohoCreator hits the database more than any other application. There are more write operations compared to other services and hence the database is heavily loaded. These database queries are very dynamic in nature.
We are preparing to host and replicate the data in multiple data centers across the world, so that our customers are not affected by any catastrophic database failures or prolonged network outage. This way even if one of the data center is affected, the others would work fine.
We have developed both REST API’s and XML-RPC/CSV-RPC. So stay tuned for the API release
Here is full length interview of Sriram by Pete Thomas at Land of ZC.
Charles Zoho Creator's Chief Engineer will be interviewed next by Pete. Watch out this space for an announcement soon.
Previous Interview at Land of ZC: Suganya about Deluge Script
After wrapping up Suganya's interview, Pete Thomas sent me an email saying that he wants to make this a series of interviews with some more guys at Zoho Creator. As we team had a good time pulling Suganya's legs after reading her interview, we decided it's Sriram's turn now to face the music! Get ready, Sriram ;)
Jokes apart, Sriram is Zoho Creator's Lead Architect. A very cool and composed guy, he handles Zoho Creator's Infrastructure, Security, Caching Architecture, Performance and more. Pete has already posted some topics which Sriram will be answering.
So all you Zoho Creator users there, if you have any questions in these topics, please feel free to post your questions at Land of ZC and get to know from Sriram what it means to manage and maintain such a user-friendly beast.
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