Stephen Rhyne's topic here ... http://help.zoho.com/portal/en/community/?ftid=2266000000632090 ... prompted me to start this (didn't want to hijack his topic).
Stephen's post hilites the general problem faced by Developers working on the ZOHO platform ... not to denigrade anyone, but I am refering to the small group of Developers (usually coming from a background of programming with real languages/scripts) whose specific needs seem to be low on the totem pole of ZOHO Creator's priorities ... yes, we have the Community Driven Feature ... but that is a democratic process ... and there are 10 times as many "casual users" as there are "developers" ... and most users don't understand or appreciate the need for functionality proposed by developers.
I think there needs to be an "by invitation only" subgroup setup in the ZOHO Creator Discussion section ... and ZOHO Creator needs to address the special needs of this group of clients.
For example ...
- the requests to have Edit Mode scripting start in Freeflow (or last used) Mode has been unrealized for at least nine months ... the time wasted hundreds of times a day is extremely frustrating
- also, the lack of any warning when you make script changes and click on Access This Application before remembering to Save Script ... has caused numerous hours of lost work
- the automatic script changes ... like changing input.FieldX to FieldX when FieldX was mis-spelt ... is another in a long line of defects that need to be addressed
- I am in the middle of a Project where I had to copy/paste four lines of script into the on User Input section of 17 fields ... only because the User Defined Functions don't have an easy way of passing the Form collection
- Each time I do a Save Script, it takes a about one second for every 4 to 6 commands ... sometimes, this amounts to 20 seconds ... by contrast, the desktop Application Builder I use compiles an entire program (around 1000 lines of script) in about 1 second !!!
- the current Marketplace setup is not condusive to showcase real Applications ... because of the propensity of the facility to assign Owner/Admin Access to every evaluator.
There is a long (very long) list of defects ... and lack of features commonly found in other development platforms ...
an open forum is not the right place to vent about our frustrations ... lest it give new comers the wrong impression ... a closed group discussion forum would be a more appropriate place for frank discussions.
Gaev