silently screaming in aggravation

I am screaming in aggravation.

My previous obsession with GameMaker is on hiatus. I love GameMaker. It offers fabulous functionality and it delivers. It also doesn't pretend to be more than it is. It doesn't offer much in the way of date and string support. So, when I decided to try to make an application to automate some of my spelling program, I decided to look elsewhere.

I wanted to build a database application. I wanted a program designed for a relational database. I wanted a scripting language robust enough to do queries/filters and to add and modify records through code. I wanted great support for strings and dates. I wanted something free. I wanted GameMaker for databases.

I didn't realize that it would be so hard to find what I wanted. After a few web searches, I found that most database stuff is geared to businesses with budgets. I worked with Microsoft Access 2.0 a lifetime ago in the summer after I graduated from college, and I would love that functionality. Unfortunately, Access is hundreds of dollars. Way out of my price range. I finally found a few online services that offered free accounts with limited functionality.

I decided to start out trying DabbleDB. The only restriction on the free account was that all data is public. Not a problem for me. This is just a spelling database. I don't care who sees it. I started to set up my database and ran into problems immediately. In my linked table, you couldn't search on the field that was a reference to an entry in another table. Okay, the quick workaround was to ditch the multiple table approach. Other problems were the annoying habit of views wanting to be saved whenever I made a change. The really annoying part was how slow everything was. Editing my data was painstakingly slow. Plus, it looked like scripting support was minimal. After spending way too many hours with DabbleDB, I decided to ditch it. I told myself that all that time wasn't wasted because I got to think more deeply about how I wanted to structure my data and interact with it.

Next, I tried ZoHo creator. This looked more promising. The restriction on the free account limited me to three applications, and only two users. That wasn't too bad. The other restriction that concerned me was that I was limited to 1000 records. That wasn't so good considering that I wanted to create records for 2000 words. Oh, well. Not to worry, I could maintain just the active words and keep under the 1000 record limit.

Zoho Creator had its own learning curve. Not too bad, but enough that I had to throw several hours at it to figure out how it worked. Plus, the more I delved into Zoho Creator, the more I was impressed with its functionality. It had great support for date data types. String datatypes were no problem. The plethora of other types of fields were great too - drop down boxes, radio boxes, combo boxes, check boxes, etc. The Deluge scripting language seemed really robust too. Then I found HTML Views where I could build my own views using HTML. It all looked awesome.

However, there were to main problems niggling at the back of my head: the safety of my data, and the stability of the program.

First I was worried about the safety of my data. I edited the properties of one field by changing some of the possible values, and the data for all of those fields got toasted. Okay, my bad. I need to be more careful about editing the definition of a field with data. However, I also am generally uncomfortable with how good Zoho's backup systems and availability are given that I'd never heard of them before. I trust Yahoo and Google with my data, but some possibly fly-by-night company? I don't know. It didn't help that another online database company (Coghead) had recently closed shop.

Then I started running into problems with the script editor in Zoho Creator. I'm used to editors like in GameMaker and MicrosoftWord. I can type freeform script and lookup functions and syntax. I can save whenever I want and deal with errors later. Zoho creator didn't have very good documentation, so I relied on its script builder that formatted stuff with the correct syntax and offered nice pick lists. However, it also drove me nuts. It wouldn't save unless everything was perfect - it would just hang. I'd try to drag and drop elements around and they wouldn't go where I wanted them. Sometimes they'd jump to some random place or the bottom of the page. I'd go to free-form mode to manually copy and paste, and then I'd leave some typo and the thing would freak out and refuse to save or load. I'd have to drop out of the entire application, loosing everything I'd done, and start from scratch. The editor was also incredibly slow. I thought that I could deal with it. After all, once the app was written I wouldn't have to mess with it again. I visited the forums and was pleased to see that it was fairly active. I searched for my issues and came up with nothing, so I decided to post them. I was pleased to get a quick reply.

Then I was editing one of my forms when Zoho creator decided to trash the better part of the form I had slaved over. Poof, it was gone! Okay, I can deal with this. It should be easier to recreate because I know which scripting elements to use and in which order. I started rebuilding. I saved religiously. The problems with the script editor kept haunting me. It wouldn't let me save a change because it insisted that a variable wasn't set, even though it was, just in a different block of code. I had to go back to free-form scripting mode and make the changes and pray that the editor wouldn't choke on it.

I'm taking a break to blog my frustrations. Zoho creator seems like a fabulous product. It looks like it has awesome functionality. I even got some of that awesome functionality to work before the lousy editor screwed it up. I've used Zoho creator for the past week to manage my spelling, and have a week's worth of data caught up in it that I'm afraid of loosing. It has all the elements that I need to create all the aspects of the app that I want. However, Zoho Creator just isn't stable enough and forgiving enough.

I'm also probably being a bit mean here, but I did a bit of poking on the Zoho Creator web site and their documentation system leaves much to be desired. Their main development seems to be in India. (Back when I was a gainfully employed member of society I watched wave after wave of layoffs in the local office while developers and q&a were shifted to India. Some excellent co-workers had to train their counterparts in India, knowing full well that they would probably be laid off after the training was complete.) Zoho's web site also has some employee blogs that haven't been used in years. While I love the functionality and the dream that the product offers, in my short experience it doesn't live up to that dream.

I'm currently looking into how to export my data so that I can reuse it somehow in some other application. I don't know where to go next.

Did you really read all of this rant? If so, I'm sorry.