ANTenna Blog -- Services

Zoho seems to be on a mission to create at least some measure of integration among applications running in the cloud. The Software as a Service vendor announced this morning that applications built with its Zoho Creator development environment can now be deployed on Google App Engine.

According to Zoho, this works for almost all of the 130,000 existing Zoho Creator applications, not just new ones built specifically for Google App Engine:

"When you open an application in Zoho Creator in edit mode, you’ll see a new option ‘Deploy in App Engine’ under ‘More Actions’ menu (on the top). This option will let you generate and download the Python code (App Engine supports deployment of Python only apps) of your Zoho Creator application which you can then deploy to Google App Engine."

Zoho has created this video to explain how it works.

While this capability won't change the world, I think it's interesting for a couple reasons. First, Zoho Creator is a drag and drop system that doesn't require programming skills. So this could be an easy way for non-programmers to take advantage of Google App
Engine. More importantly, though, it's another step toward integration of various cloud computing and SaaS platforms (and it comes on the heels of Zoho's recent announcement of Cloud SQL, which uses a standard language to access cloud-based data).

Making it easier for cloud apps and infrastructure to work with each other and with traditional software and hardware will be a key for cloud computing and Software as a Service to realize their full potential.