ZOHO Announced A Brand-New Service “Zoho Marketplace” & Zoho Creator 3

ZOHO today announced the release of a brand-new service, Zoho Marketplace.

Zoho Marketplace is a service that brings users and business application developers together. It provides a growing catalog of business applications that users can try and purchase. If you like an application you can buy it from the developer (some applications are even free) and ‘Install’ it in your Zoho account. Contrary to what happens with installing old business software, the installation is really pain- and worry- free for use. Because everything is set-up, hosted and arranged by Zoho, it only takes a few minutes to start using the application.

But what if the user can’t find the *exact* application he is looking for? No worries. Customers can also post their exact requirements to the Zoho Marketplace, and get help from third-party developers in creating the application they need.

For developers, it provides a place where they can post and market the applications they have developed in Zoho Creator – free of charge. Yeah, you read that right. There is no fee a developer has to pay Zoho to list his application.

In short, just like you can buy “stuff” in Amazon or eBay, you can also get your business applications in Zoho Marketplace.

ZOHO also released a major update for Zoho Creator. Zoho Creator allows regular folks like me to create power data-driven business applications that can be kept private, shared with a group or published to the world. They call those ‘Situated Software‘. But it can of course also be used by more advanced developers to add complex logic, interaction with other sites and more.

This release focuses more on the latter. Many new features and capabilities have added which make developing rich business applications even easier. These include:

• Custom HTML pages. Allows developers to create dynamic, fully customized HTML pages that are part of an application and embed forms, views, widgets, videos and more.

• Layout Customization. Makes it easy to create great-looking applications in seconds. Choose from a variety of layouts and themes. And of course, you can also create your own.

• Stateless Forms. Stateless forms allow developers to take advantage of all the Creator tools and environment, but gives them full control over where their data is stored.

And there’s of course many others – like full support for CRUD operations, the ability to share/un-share an application (or just components of it separately), easier to create mashups by fetching and processing data from other websites, creating maps on the fly and some others.

You can check below videos for more understanding:

• Zoho Marketplace & Zoho Creator video and demo for customers looking to buy/build business applications.
• Zoho Marketplace & Zoho Creator video and demo for software developers or people who would like to publish applications using Zoho Creator and Zoho Marketplace.