Zoho Creator got an update today with a new feature that lets you deploy your Zoho Creator applications to Google App Engine.
Zoho Creator has been one of our applications with a good set of passionate users. The apps created in Zoho Creator have been on the rise (more than 130,000 applications created so far), which I’d like to attribute to the power, flexibility and uniqueness of the application. Today, Zoho Creator takes it one step further adding a new deployment option for the applications created in Zoho Creator.
After Google App Engine’s launch, we noted that the Cloud Infrastructure Services market is getting interesting with multiple infrastructure offerings from vendors with different layers of abstraction. We also noted…
…in principle, it would be possible to layer Zoho Creator on top of Google App Engine on top of Amazon EC2.
This is basically what we have done today with this new functionality. We have layered Zoho Creator on top of Google App Engine.
App Engine Deployment
When you open an application in Zoho Creator in edit mode, you’ll see a new option ‘Deploy in App Engine’ under ‘More Actions’ menu (on the top). This option will let you generate and download the Python code (App Engine supports deployment of Python only apps) of your Zoho Creator application which you can then deploy to Google App Engine. The following video explains this process in detail.
The current deployment process is a bit geeky at this time, but we are working to make this more seamless. When applications are deployed on App Engine, entire application and the data exists with Google App Engine.
The process of deploying a Zoho Creator application on to App Engine doesn’t require knowledge of Python. You don’t even have to write a single line of code to create and deploy an application either on Zoho or Google App Engine.
Zoho Creator essentially acts as an IDE for Google App Engine.
The flexibility of generating Python code actually comes form the way Zoho Creator is designed. To be precise, it is the way Zoho Creator and Deluge are modeled in a database. This makes it easy to generate any kind of code. Currently it is Python and we can extend this to other languages in the future, if needed.
Limitations
The current version has some limitations. Applications with these features cannot be deployed on to App Engine currently.
- File Upload & Notes field
- Criteria based Views
- Group by Operator
- HTML, Summary & Calendar Views
- Themes support as in Zoho Creator
- Limited Deluge Scripting support (only email notifications are supported)
Examples
Here are couple of applications created in Zoho Creator and deployed in both Zoho & App Engine.
Contact Organizer:
Issue Manager:
With our CloudSQL release last month, we let the data free, giving you the control of your data. With this release, we are letting your applications free, offering you alternative deployment options. Welcome to the new ‘open’ model.
