Zoho Creator

I've heard a lot about Zoho before, essentially they provide Web 2.0 style office applications - many of them completely free of charge.

I didn't pay them too much attention really, being a mostly happy Google hostage.  Today I read again about their CRM which led me to look at their other offerings.  Boy was I impressed.

Initially I am just trying out Zoho Creator, it is your basic RAD database application development system, fully hosted, fully free and fully on the web and mobile.

I ofcourse had an itch to scratch, the itch being that I keep a list of my billable hours, sales, recurring bills etc all in a big old nasty VI file using  VIM Outliner.  This approach works but its hardly high tech or cross platform.

So I created a small Creator app that lists my clients, hours billed, sales items, recurring invoice items and some reports for listing invoiced and un-invoiced of each.  Some screenshots of my app:

Adding a client

Adding an invoice line

Report of unbilled time

Bulk mark items as invoiced

You can click on the images for larger versions.

This is pretty impressive, you can really imagine coding a standalone version of this for some would be fun, for me it wouldn't be a challenge and so it would be dead boring and probably take many hours that is better spent on billable work. I'd also be stuck with something else to maintain in code rather than a snazy point-and-click UI.

So how long did this app take me? Not more than 2 hours end to end, free hosting, and it's available online via my blackberry for adding items etc while on the road.

Creator also has an API like all good Web 2.0 stuff and so it is really easy for you to integrate something into this, but you could also just embed a specific report or specific input field into any page of your choice via a simple iframe.

This is a great solution for small little web apps like this, soon in Q1 2008 they will also integrate the database from Creator into the Reports app then you can do some really nice multi dimensional reports, graphs and such.

I'd recommend checking out Zoho apps. As always be sure to read the T's and C's though before handing over too much overly sensitive data.