Zohocreator - the 10 minute app!

I posted about this awhile back when I first came across it, at that time I simply did a little click click and tried things out a bit.

Recently I got that whole "bug" to drop a few pounds/kilos, OK a lot of them but hey it's the curse of the "developer's butt." What you've not heard of the "developer's butt?"

developer's butt - when your backside grows to the width of your current chair, however this seems to be a one way process and will only increase, similiar to and endless loop consuming memory.

My chair is rather comfy but also big, so it was time to do something. Being a developer this means that I just had to a write up a little program so I could keep track of it. My first thought was to open up my "Scripting in a Box" and have at it using PHP. Then I considered the effort involved, the uploading to my host, the testing, the "tweaking" and I thought that will end sooner than me being able to get into a smaller chair. So I needed a quick turn around and that made me think of ZOHO, who have several cool services, mainly my thoughts were for their ZOHO Creator which I bloged about already.

So I went in and took a peek around, I looked at one or two of the "Popular Apps" and then decided to just go ahead and "create" my own from scratch. They have a nifty little scripting language attached to this which is how they define and create the apps called "Deluge". I have to admit though I didn't actually use the scripting language itself I did the whole point and click deal.

Here's a saved copy of my script, which creates a 4 tabbed application for data input of users, daily progress and weekly progress. Daily_Tracker.ds, feel free to try it out. Normally I could also mark the application public and imbed the different forms and views in my website letting multiple people use it as well or make a copy and modify their own copy, both ways work quite well.



The thing literally only took me 10 minutes to have up and running, the more advanced things I would like to try as in dynamically updating the value in a field based on a check box being selected when the user submits is one of those items they are working on. The other item, "accessing multiple form values" I've not heard anything yet, but I'm sure I'll get an answer pretty soon.

You can also export the data or get the data via a RSS or JSON feed - this I plan to do and maybe add the RSS feed to a chart or something so I have a more "graphical" display of my progress.

All in all I would say - very cool!