Zoho has announced that its applications can be deployed on Google App Engine (GAE). Zoho offers a suite of online applications, most of them free for personal usage, and Creator, an online application creator.
Zoho Creator allows users to create customized online applications that can be deployed on Zoho’s servers. There are over 130,000 applications created to date. Zoho Creator has been upgraded with the option to deploy the application on Google App Engine. Currently, this option works by generating Python code which can be downloaded and deployed on GAE. Zoho promises the make the process more smoothly, probably by deploying on GAE directly from within Creator.
The Zoho Creator currently generates Python code, but plans are to allow users to use other languages when Google starts supporting them, according to Krishnan Subramanian.
An example of a Zoho application is:
According to Raju Vegesna of Zoho, some applications cannot be deployed on GAE yet:
- File Upload & Notes field
- Criteria based Views
- Group by Operator
- HTML, Summary & Calendar Views
- Themes support as in Zoho Creator
- Limited Deluge Scripting support (only email notifications are supported)
Chris Anderson ported GAE to Amazon’s EC2 several months ago. That means, Zoho applications can run on top of GAE which can run on EC2.