A recent post on the Zoho Creator blog shows that it continues to evolve and might one day qualify as a phenomenal development environment:
We have a series of updates planned in the next few weeks addressing easier form/view creation, more sophisticated views, easier scripting, high performance and more. Brand new hardware is also being commissioned as we speak.
Unfortunately I think the marketing effort suffers from both the Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character silliness (intentional or not) and some negative perceptions surrounding the Zoho logo.
I’ve been using Zoho Creator for work on a collaborative glossary and have also recently been looking at the Wufoo Submit and Query APIs. My advice for people who want to develop SaaS applications using outsourced resources is to look past the oh-so-Web-2.0 names and explore both sites. They offer rich functionality that’s ready to be customized, ripe for experimentation, and without the overhead of buying and maintaining your own server resources.
Other SaaS development environments that I’ve looked at, with the possible exception of Dabble DB which offers a 30-day free trial for private applications but no free private version, simply aren’t providing services at the level of Zoho and Wufoo. Between those two, Zoho Creator arguably offers a lot more bang for the free.
Some others to look at are Lazybase (the homepage is timing out in my browser right now), Wyaworks which doesn’t look like it’s being maintained anymore, Frevvo, Coghead, Dapper, Openkapow, and good ‘ol Ning.
February 23, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Pete,
Thanks for the kind words about Zoho Creator. We really passionately believe in the idea, and the whole concept of the “programmable web”. We are working furiously to bring more advancements to this.
On the logo, we kind of got attached to it already, so hard to change now
Sridhar
February 24, 2007 at 4:29 am
Sridhar, I’m very much looking forward to watching and helping Zoho Creator evolve the Web into a more programmable place. Creator seems to get better every time I visit.
I’ve thanked from this blog before, but thanks again to the ZC team for all the hard work.
As for the logo, I actually like it, but it’s the impression left on those who don’t seem to like it that might present an adoption issue…
-pete