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Zoho Creator AppEngine Extension

Zoho Creator is a powerful Web application development tool. It can export project to Google AppEngine also. But you will be disappointed if you want to do any real task with the exported code, because there are some IMPORTANT LIMITS besides the ones mentioned officially:

* Some important actions against records are removed, including DELETE, UPDATE and SEARCH
* Data access is executed in a very expensive way, and has a limitation of 1000 record for each table
* No support for 1:N mapping between tables

There are some minor issues also:

* Values of input fields are not escaped

But as a developer without good skill of UI, I still prefer to create prototypes with Zoho Creator for RAD. It's not difficult to hack the exported code with Python, HTML and Javascript. But, the interacted development with Zoho Creator and local development tools is still a big challenge. So I started to develop a toolkit with can be used with this type of project:

* One-way update from Zoho Creator to local project
* Minimized changes to code generated by Zoho Creator
* Implementations of the missed features and fixes of known bugs of generated code
* A framework for further development

Following are some tools and skills I will use:

* jQuery powered JS library for Web page hack(minimizing the changes to generated source code)
* Regexp based code converting tools to apply changes to the generated code
* Diff for one-way update

Of cause, Zoho won't like my hacks, they want to keep user playing with their hosting service rather than exporting projects to Google AppEngine. But, we all know there will be some RAD tools for AppEngine soon or later. So, why don't Zoho take the chances of becoming a leader of this trend?

Update: Now, I don't think the AppEngine code generated with Zoho Creator is a serious implementation. I prefer to hang it up before it can handle a real task.

Labels: appengine, zoho

posted by Yale Huang @ 4:44 AM