Shadows In Motion

Have you ever made a negative comment about an AJAX web application and then received the predictable response of, “Then go make your own”?  Wouldn’t it be nice if it were so easy?

With ZohoCreator it may well be that easy someday, and perhaps sooner rather than later.  This service is still in closed beta in public beta under heavy development, but as I think you will see, it has a great deal of promise.

Think of this web application as something like a Visual Basic for web development.  It allows you to create your own AJAX applications from within a graphical enviroment.  You first create and name a form (think of a form as a clean slate) onto which you will add the various objects of your application.  Text fields, email fields, options, numbers, date fields and so on.

Here is a screenshot of the first form that I created.  In this shot I am tinkering with the menu of items that I can add to the form:

From this deceptively simple interface you can create some very useful web based applications.  The first thing that I made was a simple feedback form, the details from which were stored in a database, but I soon examined the applications created by other testers who have used the demo account and was surprised to see a full fledged team management enviroment!

Here are some shots of that:

Notice the tabs along the top which are used to navigate the different sections/categories of this web app.  Also to note, the descriptive page is created by using a WYSIWYG editor when making the app itself and as such it supports web links and text formatting.

The other tabs of that web app weren’t screen capped because they contained what appeared to be actual email addresses.  I’m sure that they were fictitious, but I would rather err on the side of caution.

Another user-created application that I discovered was an editable calendar.  This interested me, so I set out to make my own and I soon found out that it really wasn’t difficult to make.  After just a few minutes I had a full calendar that I could enter data into:

I could also edit that data by interacting with the calendar:

There were a number of other applications made by fellow testers.  Some examples are a mini help desk (aka tech support), a project tracker, a recruitment application that looked like something that employees would use, and various others.

ZohoCreator is one of the more interesting AJAX based applications that I’ve come across.  Granted, I have not seen all that the web has to offer, but it’s pretty safe to say that a tool that allows anyone to create a web application to their own requirements is pretty darn useful.  Keep an eye on this one.

~Mysk

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