Which web based databases have native client for iPhone?

Don't want to disappoint you, but most web based systems don't offer native client. They rely on iPhone almost full Safari version as web browser and that's it.

DabbleDB officially confirmed the system didn't have native app. Therefore this affects the possibility of working within the system through Safari web browser in their knowledge base.

Zoho Creator announced they had optimized web layout for iPhone and even created special mobile version.

I've also found indirect confirmation on TrackVia forum the system works on iPhone.

I guess Caspio, TeamDesk and WorkXpress are also available through web browser on iPhone and iPod touch.

Check out the good news now.

Recently Intuit guys have announced on their blog their partner MCF Technology Solutions presented new iPhone application in called PocketBase. Instead of accessing QuickBase via the iPhone’s web browser, MCF Tech has leveraged QuickBase’s API to present QuickBase applications with native iPhone functionality. Currently the application doesn't allow to add/remove records, you can view it only.

I think this is the step in the right direction, because working with such an app is far better than through browser. Anyway mobile devices have a way smaller screen and require other approaches to resolve this issue.

What do you think?

Update from Andrew Catton:

Dabble DB pages are optimized to work both with iphone and android (we think this is the right way to do it, as the pages interfaces are much better suited to a small mobile screen than the core app, and you're more likely to be quickly entering data or checking a pre-defined view in this scenario). More details here.

Calculator to compare prices of web based systems

Now you can compare prices and choose the solution easier.

Just with one clik the calculator I've added to the blog shows which web based system is more affordable for you.

Update:

Recently TeamDesk has changed their prices. The calculator is updated as well.

WorkXpress customers don't need SEO deployment?

Recently I’ve asked WorkXpress guys if their system was capable of implementing the similar functionality Caspio Bridge offered. I was pretty surprised at the answer WorkXpress customers didn’t need such a feature.

Steve Becker from WorkXpress said:

"Caspio’s flavor of PaaS caters to web publishers and to producing public facing content that can be accessed without login credentials. It sounds like a great feature for this type of product to be able to allow search engines to index that content.

On the other hand, our flavor of PaaS produces "web applications" which require users to enter a login and password to access private content. Obviously, our customers don’t want a search engine to be able to crawl and publicize their private data records such as customers, invoices or inventory.

As always, we try to be responsive to our customer’s requests, and produce the features they are asking for. Our customers have not asked for this feature to date. As stated above though, Caspio does have a different customer base and fills a different niche than we do."

It’s difficult to make any conclusions how different WorkXpress customer base is and who their Ideal Customer really is.

We can take real estate agency as an example. Of course it has some database of this property and its logical to give an opportunity to view or search this database for potential clients on their site.

Could search engine availability of this information cause any damage for the company?

Maybe the problem is real WorkXpress customer base is not that large and there is no client that needs such a feature?

What if use TeamDesk to make data available to search engine?

Caspio announcement of new SEO technology makes you wonder if other vendors can offer their ways in this respect. How TeamDesk solves this issue and what one can expect from the system if talk about making data available to the largest possible audience?

This is what Kirill Bondar, the representative of TeamDesk Support, said:

"For every application TeamDesk provides SOAP API to allow data manipulation from third party web pages or applications - it's a part of standard functionality. All you need to start working with an API is a SOAP-enabled language like C#, VB.NET, Java, PHP or Ruby. Of course you can use API from JavaScript as well - the connector classes are provided.

To see it in action, you may want to check TeamDesk application library."

"Its content is managed by our team through regular TeamDesk application that allows editing the title, keywords, descriptions, place images and attach support documents, categorize applications and many more."

As you can see the TeamDesk uses the same approach QuickBase offers. The good news is you can use TeamDesk as back-end database for your site for only $9/month. But one should note this implementation requires knowledge of scripting and is not available in simple wizard-like style as Caspio offers.

When will Zoho Creator get to the point to make app data available to search engine?

Is there a way to get an access to the data stored out of Zoho Creator ecosystem? Is Deluge Script the only way to access and manipulate data in Zoho Creator?

I asked these questions Zoho Support to figure out how to implement SEO deployment method within Zoho Creator platform.

This is what Charles form Zoho Creator answered:

"Currently this is not possible in Zoho Creator. However, as a first step, we are planning to address this in a completely different way. In this case, users would not need to have any servers on their end. We will let users add their domain name mapped to an application and the entire application will be served from a sub-domain which will have the application name as the prefix (sub-domain name). For example, if your company name is xyz.com and you have an application named products, you can access the page from products.xyz.com. Going forward, we will provide direct deployment to servers that support PHP, ASP, and JSP."

Well, it's kinda difficult to make any conclusions based on future plans not seeing any specific implementation. But as I see it now Zoho Creator is not that search engine friendly, as it dynamically generates pages using JavaScript on the end user's browser. So, search engine recognizes only lots and lots of JavaScipt code but content of your app.

How does QuickBase make data available to largest possible audience?

With recent Caspio Bridge announcement of new SEO deployment method I wondered how many vendors out there catch up with that. Apparently, QuickBase has something to show us in this respect as well.

I asked QuickBase support if there was any chance to accomplish it in QuickBase and this was the answer Kirk Trachy provided me with:

"QuickBase customers have been managing their web content with QuickBase for years. In fact our website is littered with content that originates in a QuickBase database and is presented dynamically on our website via PHP SDK and our native QuickBase API. SEO is naturally built into the content as our web server renders dynamic pages. This is standard use of our free API and you can use any of our six SDKs to do it - free. You can use PHP, VB, Ruby, JAVA, C# and Pearl and if you want to do client side stuff you can use JavaScript."

The screenshot shows the look of QuickBase backend database:


The content is created and edited in QuickBase application. Then on Intuit servers the results are published on QuickBase web site using Quickbase SDKs and API:



Data is dynamic – including text, graphics and SEO. The benefit of managing web content in a database like QuickBase are many. Now contributing team members can update the content they are responsible for and updates to titles, text, graphics and tags including SEO keywords is immediate and without the delays and bottlenecks of waiting for the webmaster to make these changes.

Along with good news from QuickBase there are several moments you should take into account in case you consider QuickBase as back-end database for your web site. Even though the use of API is free, QuickBase's cheapest license costs more than Caspio: their minimal payment is $249/month $299/month. Note, in case you need more space for images or videos additional 100MB cost $100/month.

Update

QuickBase has recently changed their prices. Now minimal payment is $299/month with 1 Gig of file attachment space and unlimited applications. You can add additional gigs for just $25/month.

Will Caspio SEO Technology be a Breakthrough for Cloud Database Apps as promised?

Recently Caspio Bridge has announced groundbreaking new SEO deployment method, empowering web publishers to easily make their data available to the largest possible audience.

This is what Frank Zamani, founder and CEO of Caspio, says:

"Caspio's new SEO deployment model is a game-changer, opening up unlimited possibilities for our customers to reach search engine users and leverage data for profitable business ventures."

Let's take a closer look what's that about.

As with all deployment models of Caspio Bridge, the deployment code does not contain any of your data. It is a set of instructions that retrieves the appropriate data and application interfaces from your Caspio Bridge account, in real time at the moment it is accessed by a user.


The difference between SEO deployment and other deployment models is that the deploy code does not run on the end user's browser. Instead, the SEO deployment code runs on your server. This is critical, because the search engine crawler must believe that the data resides on your own server. When the page with the SEO deployment code is accessed by a user or Web crawler, your server executes the deployment code, retrieves the data from Caspio, and delivers it to the requestor.

This is the look of wizzard that generates code for SEO deplyment:


Caspio provides the deploy code in three languages: PHP, ASP and ASPX.

There is one important moment of all this, the price:

"SEO deployment is available now to Caspio Bridge Professional or higher packages starting at $189.95 per month."

This sum is not that small I must say - $2279.40 per year.

I wonder if this new opportunity will really be a "game-changer", what other vendors can offer and at which price?

Calculating working time. Let’s sum up.

I’d like to sum up the results of testing in one place to make the picture of calculating working time capability more clear so users could see at once how good the system is solving this issue.

This is a brief description of what we’ve got trying to calculate future date or time duration within web based systems:

TeamDesk

TeamDesk almost completely managed to implement our task. The system’s only shortcoming was End Date calculation if working hours fluctuate every day. Nevertheless, it is the best result so far among the vendors pretending for a "no-coding" technique.

Caspio

Caspio Bridge’s capability of executing customer’s own code on server using SQL triggers opens wide horizons for implementing complex business logic in applications. The only problem is that you should be quite familiar with SQL in order to use it to the full extent. There also one more point that draws my attention: though I don’t know how data isolation is implemented in Caspio, but I think that possibility of running own code on server could present higher security risk of unauthorized data access.

TrackVia

TrackVia can perform complex calculation, but the system is not able to calculate End Date while accounting working days (not even talking about hours). The main problem is that the function weekdays is not designed for worldwide usage.

Zoho Creator

Zoho Creator proofed to be able to calculate End Date and Duration, correctly accounting working days and hours. I had no doubts in this tool even before starting our tests since "Deluge Script", which Zoho is based on, is actually nothing less than a programming language.

Dabble DB

Unfortunately, DabbleDB does not offer the ability to calculate duration for arbitrary "work hours".

PerfectForms

In PerfectForms behaviors are just another way of programming through flow charts. Besides, it’s more difficult to see complete app logic picture as each particular behavior distorts it. On the other hand "behavior" provides users with some flexibility so you can program business logic and calculations of the form.

QuickBase

As testing showed variable hours of operations and the weekends different from Saturday and Sunday can't be implemented with built-in QuickBase functionality. I think it’s possible in QuickBase, but only in case we always have 8 hours working day with Saturday and Sunday as weekends. To calculate working time and you will have to do some coding through one of six SDKs or HTTP XML API.

Taking into account all the peculiarities of calculating working time we can say it is not such an easy task for web based systems. If go programming way as Zoho Creator does the task is not that difficult, but it requires different skills. There is another option to implement through setup. In this case you should keep in mind that capabilities of these systems are pretty limited too. Of course, some of them can manage it better, this time TeamDesk proved to be the most advanced system calculating working time.

QuickBase surprises calculating working time

QuickBase is one of the most mature products of the online database market. One can think with years of experience and such a huge client base there is no issue the system can’t solve. That’s why it was quite a surprise that the task to calculate working time with working days and hours was a hard nut to crack.

This example is prepared with Kirk Trachys help and I’d really like to thank for the assistance. He commented on the implementation peculiarities of End Date (Test 1) calculation taking into account hours of operation and holidays in QuickBase:

"QuickBase has some native field types and formula functions that address the calculations of dates, workdates and weekdays. Many calculations can be as simple as: WeekDayAdd([Start Date],[Business Days]). Where this takes a start date and you add the number days to it and it only calculates for Monday through Friday days. The result will jump over weekends and resume the next week if necessary. In the calculations below we created a field to accept a Start Date (01-01-2009) and another to accept the number of hours a task might take (120). Since each weekday was 8 hours we calculated the number of days by making them divisible by 8 hours resulting in (15) Business Days."

"Now that we have calculated the business days we need to account for the holiday schedule so we add the holiday dates (see table below) and then calculated if there were any holiday dates that should be added to the calculation. We calculate this by totaling how many times a holiday is present between the [Start Date] and the [Start Date Plus Business Work Days]. This holiday count is added to the business days and applied as a total to the WeekDayAdd function. The End Date then reflects both days based on hours as well as any holidays. Below is the same form as above but with the formulas displayed as text to the right of each field:"

"All of this was calculated in one table. When calculating date ranges that bridge over multiple year periods one will want to use a relationship to multiple records."

"QuickBase provides over 160 formula functions and operators with six SDKs and an open HTTP XML API."

Conclusions

From Kirks description and the app we can see "Hours of Operation" info is not used during the calculation. So I assume, variable hours of operations and the weekends different from Saturday and Sunday can't be implemented with built-in QuickBase functionality.

Even though Kirk didn’t manage to calculate duration between two timestamps (Test 2) I think it’s possible in QuickBase, but only in case we always have 8 hours working day with Saturday and Sunday as weekends.

The situation is the same as with TrackVia: WeekDayAdd function can’t be applied worldwide and count the data as needed and built-in QuickBase functionality doesn’t allow to implement this calculation without it, using hours of operation info.

Unfortunately 160 formula functions and operators can’t help you to calculate working time and you will have to do some coding through one of six SDKs or HTTP XML API.

Are you a fan of flow charts? The way PerfectForms calculate working time.

If you like to create flow charts and define properties take a closer look at PerfectForms. The same Adobe Air platform Coghead used with similar in many respects ideology built around the form that lets you implement pretty complicated business concept.

I really appreciate the help of Paula Selvidge and the example she prepared.
This is how the result of working time calculation looks like in PerfectForms:


Paula commented on the results of implementation methods of Filter weekends and Filter holidays when calculating total available time.

Filter Weekends

"I have employed two ways to address weekends in this application. The first way is via the function Date Difference in the Formula Editor using this function one chooses the start and finish date. Then they choose the unit value (h for hours, m for minutes, d for days). If you type in "wd" (weekdays) for the value you will filter out weekends from the day count."

"The second way used a Simple Branch behavior that checked if the word "Saturday" or "Sunday" matched the date being examined. I used the Weekday Name function in the Formula Editor to return the name of the date being examined and I simply checked to see if it was on a Saturday or Sunday."

Filter Holidays

"Since observed holidays vary from country to country and business to business I decided to manually create lists of the holidays that would be checked during the form operation. Like the weekend solution, I have employed two ways to resolve the problem.The first solution uses a Multiline Text Input box with the holiday dates to check. This field is hidden on the form."

"The second solution that I also employed was specific to the working time calculation. Where we set the beginning and end date for a project and get the workable hours. In this solution, I created hidden date fields with the holiday dates inserted."

"Next the form would check if any of these values existed within the dates selected. When it checks for Christmas it would look like this:"

"Checking if the date I labeled as Christmas was within or on the dates entered."

This is how form customization looks in PerfectForms:


This is the algorithm (Behavior as they call it in PerfectForms) of what happens by pressing "Until Completion" button to calculate Working Days and Hours of Work:


And by pressing "End Date" button to calculate Days of Completion we have the following algorithm:


Conclusions:

As you can see Behaviors are just another way of programming through flow charts. To be honest I am not a fan of such a method for I think this way is more cumbersome if compare it with a text method. Besides, it’s more difficult to see complete app logic picture as each particular behavior distorts it. On the other hand "behavior" provides users with some flexibility so you can program business logic and calculations of the form.