ZOHO has been consistently impressing all with its agility and the speed at which it is launching new app’s in this ever changing landscape. Zoho has now announced the release of ZOHO meeting.
We announced Zoho Meeting in March and it was in Private Beta till now. Today it steps out as a Public Beta where anyone with a Zoho Account can use Meeting. The application is free while it is in Beta.
Of all the applications from ZOHO, the one which has caught my attention is ZOHO creator, which is a Form Based Database application. It can be used to create online database and HTML forms to leverage that data in a matter minutes. I had written about this in the past and even took Zoho creator out for a test drive and was impressed with intuitive UI. ZOHO Creator opens up the opportunity for community to develop complex CRM or ERP applications with ZOHO underneath, much like SalesForce’s AppExchange.
ZNET has a an article quoting Raju Vegesna (Zoho’s chief evangelist)
More near term, Zoho is working on a higher-end database solution. Unlike Creator, which is a forms-based database application builder, Zoho DB will handle search and import and export of data and tables from a variety of formats, including Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server, Vegesna said.
ZOHO should open up ZOHO Creator/DB via JavaScript API’s and thus making it more flexible. Right now (atleast when I last checked) the ZOHO Creator forms had to be embedded as IFRAME in HTML pages. Had published a white paper on WebDB and Javascript enabled online DB. It would be great if ZOHO offered API to their data base apps. This would provide more flexibility to developers to add database driven application via Javascript in HTML pages. This way users can create widgets, mashups etc of their own. Web based applications can now be reduced to just HTML pages, which can be hosted on blogs or even Google pages or geocities etc.
