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.

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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):

• No. of Application Installs : 4125
• No. of Apps Published : 69
• Most Installed App : Project Management Plus by Aparna S, (no. of Installs - 855)
• No. Projects Posted by the Users : 55

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 »

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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.

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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

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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!

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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

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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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K. Hovnanian® Homes™ is a nationally recognized homebuilder that has been committed to excellence since 1959. The company started as a family-owned business, and through well-defined acquisition efforts, has expanded over the years to become a family of homebuilders with localized expertise in numerous markets throughout the United States.

Getting to the point, this below picture demonstrates how K. Hovnanian® Homes™ operated their business on a daily basis ie., collecting the home listing information of various parts of the state from their sales representatives and publishing this information onto their corporate website (www.khov.com).

And after putting in much effort and time, the team was unable to provide consistent, accurate and real-time information for their customers when they requested them for. It cost them a lot in terms of money and customer satisfaction.

Alan Bradford, the marketing consultant of K. Hovnanian® Homes™ stumbled upon Zoho Creator. Combining Zoho Creator, Zoho Chat and another free website hosting service, the team was able to setup an environment where their sales associates can update their information easily. The entire process took them just 3 weeks. Yes just 3 weeks. Read the full story here.

Another interesting thing I found from Alan’s personal blog is that he has been using Zoho Creator for his personal needs since Sep 2006. Since then, he has been waiting patiently for Zoho Creator to become more reliable in terms of speed and uptime to use it for business needs (read his comment at Land of ZC). Thanks for your patience Alan, hope it paid off.

Do check out his personal blog - Big Ugly Couch, he writes some pretty interesting stuff there!

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Pete Thomas of Share Tactics has started an exclusive blog just dedicated to Zoho Creator and its called Land of ZC. He has been busy building many interesting apps and is posting fine details of it at Land of ZC.

Pete hit upon the idea of interviewing backstage guys of Zoho Creator. Neither business nor promotional interviews, he just wanted to interview about some of the technical aspects of Zoho Creator. To start with, Pete will interview Suganya J, Deluge Script’s Lead Architect.

Well, here is your chance to fire all the questions you had in mind about Deluge Script. Post all your questions at this blog : Talk With Suganya J and she will answer your questions. Pete, get ready!

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Since Zoho Creator 2.0 launch we had one big update - FaceBook Integration and now we have another big announcement - Charting.

Charts in Zoho Creator helps you to organize and analyze your data. We have rolled out 15 types of charts in the first phase:

• Column, Stacked Column, Column 3d, Stacked Column 3d
• Bar, Stacked Bar, Bar 3d, Stacked Bar 3d
• Line, Step
• Pie, Pie 3D
• Area, Stacked Area
• Web Chart

As always with Zoho Creator, it’s best to see it in action. We have created a new screencast to highlight charting. Check it out!

We know that no two needs are the same when you want to see the data. So we have provided a wide range of charts to help you to visualize the same data in different formats.

Go ahead, dress up your application data as charts and let us know your suggestions.

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