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.

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?

The Ideal Customer. Vendors define who he is.

So many times I’ve reviewed web-based systems from common user’s perspective looking for solutions that correspond to their expectations. This time my aim is a bit different. The other thing which is not less important is the vision of IDEAL CUSTOMER vendors have.

I’d like to clear up which user type attracts them the most and whom they would like to deal with. Because all these hype "we can serve EVERYBODY and solve EVERYTHING" almost all vendors proclaim only puzzles users rather than shows what to expect from the service.

So, I asked main vendors to specify their IDEAL CUSTOMER picture and this is their description:

Chris Basham from TrackVia:

A business (not a consumer).

Rapidly solving a business-critical problem (not a minor issue, or simply building a list of items).

Needs a sophisticated workflow application where each item in the app is valuable to the business, and each item is frequently processed/updated, with event-based alerts sent to users.

Requires a highly secure platform, with 100% availability and fast response time (no downtime or slow page loads).

Values "astounding" customer support, including live phone support during business hours, and hands-on help.

5 to 5000 users, of different levels of technical sophistication, will be working in the account frequently, with differing access levels to features, records, fields, etc.

The app is used by users who’re logged-in to the account (not by website visitors.

Treff LaPlante from WorkXpress:

"WorkXpress is focused on providing programmatic-level functionality faster and more easily than if using traditional programming languages. Our ideal customer is either a non-developer who wants to produce superior software functionality or a developer who wants to greatly accelerate their software development timeframes. The ideal customer is typically creating software to automate one or two departments, or in smaller businesses they are automating the entire company."

Frank Zamani from Caspio Bridge:

"The right customer is one who has a relevant project and appropriate skills.

As far as required skills, Caspio is a feature-rich and capable platform that is intended for tech-savvy business users. Tech-savviness is a spectrum, and depending on the user’s knowledge, or skills gained by using Caspio and our free training, they can learn to utilize more complex features to create truly sophisticated web applications. With this philosophy, customers don’t grow out of Caspio. There is always something new and exciting to learn and add to their web apps.


As for the projects themselves, we strive to offer capabilities that most common internal and public facing applications require. In particular, we uniquely make it easy and affordable to build and maintain

mass-scale apps that go on to have thousands of named authenticated users, and

are deployed to customer’s own site in a seamless fashion.

For us customer size is of no consequence."

Kirill Bondar from TeamDesk:

"Our ideal customers are ones who set up an application themselves and get the most out of it. We've seen it many times: they start changing and tuning their application and can't stop because of opening possibilities to automate this and that and even more and improve it further, and quickly become addicted by the process. They enjoy the process of improvement because our customers are business people typically - not the developers - and the opportunity to do it themselves is like climbing the peak with ready application as the reward.

Such customers will have two major advantages over the rest:

A full control - they know how their application works and they do not afraid to change it.

A speed - noone knows their business process better than they are; they do not need to write the specifications and explain it to developers, they just do what they need. They can try to do it in different ways to see what works best for them or quickly adopt their application to the changes in business process."

Paula Selvidge from PerfectForms:

"PerfectForms is designed with the business user in mind as the target audience. Our goal is to empower the person closest to the problem to create the solution that meets their needs.

Now, with that said, I fully understand and agree that application development encompasses a wide range of unique skills. I think the complexity of the solution that the customer intends to build is a key factor for consideration. I feel business analysts tend to have the best broad skill set, in regards to identifying requirements, designing interfaces and understanding workflow which enables them to create, usable and effective, complex applications in tools like PerfectForms. Admittedly, it is possible to use any of these development tools to create some very poor applications. The inherent product challenge is offering the power and flexibility for more advanced users, while still providing an interface that supports less experienced or novice users. I believe PerfectForms is straddling the middle at this point but this is not where we strive to be. We will continue to enhance our product and find ways to effectively help those that don’t have the optimal skills for application development to build solutions that meet their needs.

In terms of our market focus, we target SMBs. We are at a price point that falls in the strike zone for smaller group budgets, which tend to be business focused, so they are empowered to quickly purchase a tool that meets their needs without the lengthy enterprise evaluations. For those groups, they tend to select PerfectForms as a solution because they lack access to IT resources or are prioritized lower for development since their deliverables may not be as ‘mission critical’ to the organization."

As you can see, the question is not that easy as it seems at first but some of them managed to shed some light on this point anyway.

Which type of database does your vendor rely on?

In the majority of cases users have no direct access to database back-end that their system uses for data organization/storage. Usually you manipulate data with interface or API. One can say it doesn’t really matter from the end user standpoint.

But still the choice of the database back-end defines system possibilities and ideology in many respects. This is the reason why I questioned vendors of products I review in my blog which database they use (if any), the reason of their choice and what kind of advantages it offers.

Avi Bryant from Dabble DB:

"We use a custom, in-memory object database. This allowed us to more easily provide the flexible data migration, sophisticated data types, and fast interactive querying that we wanted to offer our users."

Frank Zamani from Caspio Bridge:

"Caspio utilizes Microsoft SQL Server for its database. From day one, back in 2000, we knew that employing a powerful and scalable database is of utmost importance to us. We initially chose Oracle but soon encountered issues operating Oracle on a Microsoft stack. As a result in, our next release we dropped Oracle and replaced it with SQL Server.

The criteria remain high reliability and high scalability within a Microsoft stack. The result of our choice is evident in our ability to power some of the most demanding web applications for our enterprise customers."

Jim Salem from QuickBase:

"QuickBase chose to build a proprietary database to store app data. There are three reasons:

1) Scalability
Traditional relational database platforms are targeted towards supporting a relatively small number of potentially very large databases. Because of this, they run into significant scalability challenges when trying to host millions of independent databases. QuickBase’s architecture avoids these traditional scalability issues entirely. It can continue to support more and more applications just by adding additional hardware. Our application density (number of active applications hosted per server) is significantly higher than other online databases.

2) Performance
We chose an "in memory database" architecture because it’s significantly faster (and simpler) than traditional database architectures for the size problems that QuickBase targets.

3) Native Support for Easy-to-Use Web Data Types
We wanted to avoid the complexity of traditional databases leaking through into QuickBase’s UI. Unlike traditional databases, QuickBase was built from the ground up with the web in mind. Primitive QuickBase data types include email addresses, URLs, and versioned file attachments. These all require special coding (and overhead) on traditional databases. In addition, we implemented an easy-to-use relationship model that our users find simpler than the SQL "join" operations and index configuration required on traditional databases."

Chris Basham from TrackVia:

"TrackVia is built on the LAMP stack (Linux / Apache / MySQL / Perl).
The reason that we chose the LAMP stack is that TrackVia is differentiated from our competition by 1) Security, 2) Uptime, 3) Fast page loads.

Unlike many technology companies, we actually don’t want to have our service run on the newest technology that’s available. We only want our service to rely on mature, "battle tested" technologies that have been around for so long that all of the bugs have already been discovered and fixed. For example, we don’t run the most current version of MySQL. We run an older version that’s more stable and predictable.

As a result of this philosophy, we are able to truly deliver on the 3 items above – security, uptime and fast page loads."

Kirill Bondar from TeamDesk:

"We are using Microsoft SQL Server for TeamDesk.

In fact, we are using it for all our products for about 8 years. It proves itself reliable and scalable, delivers good performance in almost every case and provides tight integration with server platform, web environment and development tools.

Just one fact: rather than storing formula or summary column evaluation results and tracking the changes in dependend columns to know when the value needs recalculating, TeamDesk, thanks to Microsoft SQL Server performance, just calculates it on the fly. Even with large data sets and a lot of interconnected tables, this way rarely causes performance problems."

Yoge from Zoho Creator:

"We use our proprietary grid storage that is based on MySql. The reason for our choice is open source solution allow us to scale the performance to the desired level."

Treff LaPlante from WorkXpress:

"We use MySQL. We began our R&D in 2001 on MS SQL backend, and in 2003 switched to MySQL. We made the switch primarily because we knew we wanted to save our customers licensing costs, however, it's turned out to be a great decision on many levels. First, MySQL has a talented user community that we interact with to share knowledge and code. Second, MySQL has established itself in recent years with all manner of enterprise as an accepted and in some cases preferred database. Finally, the available packages and options for MySQL have greatly accelerated our time to market with new feature sets."

Aditya Tandon from Wolf Frameworks:

"We support Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL database. Currently for our OnDemand model, we offer the MySQL database which helps to lower cost for our customers. For us, database is storage and we plan to add support for other databases soon."

Paula Selvidge from PerfectForms:

"When we began development of PerfectForms in 2006, we primarily evaluated Oracle vs SQL and chose SQL due to the factors outlined below. We are also going to support SQL Express by year end, since it will further reduce costs for our customers who want to pursue an on-premise solution.

We chose SQL over Oracle due to:

1. Reliability and scalability
2. Lower cost for customers
3. Consistency with our MS stack
4. Our API is built on asp.net, so going with SQL offered better performance
5. Less costly from a support, maintenance and resource perspective for us internally."

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading all the answers as I did. Frankly, I don’t want to make any conclusions here. But I think this information can help you choose the system that is of better use for you.

So, you can check out the summary on back-end database vendors provided us with:

Dabble DB	Custom, in-memory object database
Caspio Bridge	Microsoft SQL Server
QuickBase	Custom proprietary database
TrackVia	MySQL
TeamDesk	Microsoft SQL Server
Zoho Creator	Custom storage based on MySQL
WorkXpress	MySQL
Wolf Frameworks	MySQL (for hosted service option)
PerfectForms	Microsoft SQL Server

Marketing bullshit or looking for a silver bullet

Have you ever paid attention to vendors’ promo pages and how they promise you the moon? It’s been always interesting to observe how they manage to count your saved money and compose comparison charts the way competitors completely suck displaying such charateristics you can't come up with any idea why they exist at all if so.

I think these 2 examples I’ve stumbled upon recently illustrate this approach better than words can say.

Zoho Creator can count your saved time and money, see? They already know!


The full version can be checked here.

What especially amazes me in this table is 0 in "Data Modeling" row of Zoho Creator. Do system developers really believe there is no need to think how to organize data in the system? The truth is you have to think about it and this is an important moment that defines future functionality of the application.

My point is you’ll have to pay more attention to it in Zoho Creator (and in any other PaaS system), therefore spend more time on it than with Traditional Model. All these platforms have their own peculiarities and limitations and there is a huge probability you will go non standard way organizing the data to build needed reports or get an acceptable app performance and work efficiently within the app.

There is one more peculiarity this table of "saved time" doesn’t mention. Each PaaS (unlike Traditional Model that uses only well known proven methods and instruments) has its own unique approach you’ll have to learn. Take Zoho Creator Deluge Script, for example. Believe me it takes some time before you know how to deal with that.

I’d say even more. It seems to me that in general time spent on PaaS solution can even exceed time Traditional Model requires. The same situation with money. The thing is it’s not that obvious for the cycle is extended. It means you get the app that works really quickly and you have to invest your time until you see its good enough.

This is one more example how vendors compare their products with competitors. Let’s take a closer look at WorkXpress:


Full version of this you can find here.

Laugh all you want, but vendors really believe there is no system that can compete with WorkXpress. We can simply shut our eyes to this for parents always believe their children are the best in the world with no flaws at all. I can’t say exactly how far this "Anyone can use" axis goes and where the vendor places his own product, but I couldn’t jump start with it at once without reading a tutorial. And that wasn’t necessary while testing other products. Maybe this is just me or I am simply too dumb to handle these new 5GL system?

Who knows? I decided to check if things were different with my old friend, software developer for many years by the way. Just asked him to create a table with 2 columns to input two numbers where the 3 column displays the result of its division without any tutorial or help. And guess what.. It was quite a surprise he didn’t manage to handle it and just gave up. Is something wrong with us?

So, I want to say that marketing people seem to create these pages with no knowledge of product actual advantages and what really distinguishes it from the rest of competitors. But they know its limitations very well. The funny thing is somehow they manage to present it as product advantages. That’s why I’d strongly recommend you to check these pages so you know what can cause issues in the future.

And don’t forget there is no better way to get a complete picture than try and check yourself.

WHAT?! You didn't divide by zero, did you?

Recently in TeamDesk blog I’ve stumbled on post about divide by zero and couldn’t help but check if there is a stark contrast handling it in different web-based systems. My aim is to find out what tactic each vendor uses through a quick test.

So, in each system I will use the same example. Let’s input 2 numbers A and B, divide one by another and see what happens when divide by zero.


I am kicking off with TeamDesk, the instigator of the test:


The system correctly displays the result division by zero happened.

What about Dabble DB?


One can see a blank as result. We have the same situation with QuickBase:


In Zoho Creator Divide by Zero results in 0:


In TrackVia we have blank as the result, and the system explaines in the field history that divide by zero occurs:


And, finally, WorkXpress. The system recognized divide by zero happened, but couldn’t handle it well:


Conclusion:

In general systems are capable of managing the issue somehow. I don’t think it’s a good idea to deliver 0 as a result of division by zero as Zoho Creator does. Not everything is clear with WorkXpress in this case. I wonder if it’s normal reaction of the system to any error or just to division by zero.

Choosing data driven app? Jump start from the right foot.

I've been asked oftentimes what system is better to choose for solving particular task and what system will serve best for each specific need.

So, I’ve tried to summarize the experience personally I had exploring functionality of below listed web-based apps. This is a brief description in alphabetical order:

Your front-end must be completely integrated into your web site? Are you a newspaper? A lot of your competitors are already using Caspio Bridge. You can be the next. If you are curious how MS Access would look if it was completely made on web-browser check out Caspio Bridge.

In case you need easy to use tool for data analysis over the web Dabble DB is your choice. This is not some useless web-based Excel clone, but a system with its own approach and philosophy. I think you’ll like it.

Are you searching for not that expensive solution as Salesforce? Check out LongJump. The system may even surprise with more powerful functionality than Salesforce in some areas. But I guess its complexity makes the system not so good for small business.

Looking for a solution from a mature vendor? Your budget isn’t strictly limited? Want a system with a time tested functionality and opportunity to create a full-fledged app? Try QuickBase. Besides, no developing skills needed.

Want to build a complete application, but QuickBase is too much for your budget? Check out TeamDesk. Salesforce styled interface and robust functionality is there for building a complete solution. If you can write few formulas in Excel, than you'll handle TeamDesk easily.

Looking for something simple to manage a couple of tables? Try TrackVia. Easy to use and learn, but in case you’ll need something more complex in the future, no way to do this within the system. I think the system is a bit costly for such a limited functionality.

Can’t reckon it up: tested not that much. It takes some effort to master a non standard interface though. From the first sight I can tell the WorkXpress is robust enough, but is no Salesforce killer and won’t blow your mind as developers promise.

If you are a programmer or pursue it, but PHP or ASPX scare you try Zoho Creator. Mastering Deluge Script is not easier, but you can do a lot with scripting.

Of course, this is my personal opinion and vendors can disagree at some points. Anyway, it never hurts to take it into consideration in case remarks are really reasonable. Well, we'll see if any...

Updated

Due to Treff LaPlante (WorkXpress President & CEO) concern:

"Further, when compared with the other reviews, it places us quite falsely in a negative light. If your intent is to print an incorrect review, then please let it stand; time will reveal the truth. If you acknowledge that maybe others who have spent more time with the platform overcoming the "non standard interface" are seeing some potential here then I encourage you to amend your review to focus on the lack of time you’ve spent with it."

Corrected. We’ll see what time reveals.

Is there a way to calculate running total in WorkXpress?

There are some key features in any service the help in driving success. To my opinion Running total really add to this. This is the reason I pay attention to how it works in any web based system.

To calculate running total in WorkXpress let’s get back to our standard example with Date and Amount:


At first I tried to calculate running total myself. But after few steps were taken I reached a deadlock, so had to ask Workxpress guys to help me out. Treff LaPlante (WorkXpress President & CEO) was there to assist me and answered my question:

"…running totals is a feature that we’ve supported in WorkXpress in previous generations of the platform; however, we’ve just released the support for this current generation of the platform."

This is how it is tuned. I’ve added the second field Amount on the list through Reuse tab on the Block Creator:

It allows you while editing this field to set up an alternative name using "Use Local Field Label" property:



To calculate running total on "Currency and Number Settings" tab set up "Alternative value to show" property into "Running Total".


After saving the data we’ve got needed result:


In case you need more detailed instructions you may check out the info here.

Conclusions:

Actually, I think the user won’t have any problem configuring how to calculate Running Total in WorkXpress. If talk about systems I’ve tested the implementation of this function in WorkXpress is one of the easiest regarding set up from business user standpoint.

There is one more interesting thing to learn from this case, the same situation happened while trying to find out how to import data into Zoho Creator. This can be a moot point, but as the matter of fact it shows the system immaturity. Some developers rush to add features to the product in case of missing functionality. On the other hand this can be considered as the "Reality Check" of the product.

WorkXpress twists and turns of editing one record simultaneously

I really like to test the capability (or incapability) of the system to edit records simultaneously.

It’s always fascinating to find the developers took a good care of users in this respect. Just picture the situation when from time to time your data get into a mess the moment somebody decides to edit it right away it occurs to you.

How is this issue handled in WorkXpress? Let’s check it through a standard test when one and the same record is opened in 2 browsers.

So, let’s open the record in IE and change Last and Hiredate Columns:

And open the record in Firefrox and change Last and First Columns:


And save the record in IE first:


Do the same in Firefox:


What we’ve got here? First thing: the system doesn’t really care about simultaneous editing. It means there is no warning you corrupt somebody’s data.

But the good news is the system tracks only fields the user modifies and doesn't overwrite them.. One can see on the screenshots hire date is not overwritten.

And one more thing: you can add audit for field modification.


It’s time to edit Last field in 2 different browsers and check out how the system acts.


This is the report about modifications in the Last column:



Conclusion:

WorkXpress doesn’t support simultaneous record editing so the user could know he overwrites somebody’s data. But field track history really helps here. At least you can always find the person who corrupted yours. Better than nothing.