ZC 3.0 I have SEEN it!

this is a repost in the hopes that more will see it...

Perhaps I can get your minds off the long delays surrounding the roll out of ZC 3.0 by relating some of the many exciting features I have SEEN in the latest build of ZC 3.0. As a professional developer and recent member of the ZC Partners Program, as was treated to an online demo of ZC 3.0 over the weekend. I can say that as a developer of browser-based applications for over 10 years, ZC 3.0 has answered most of the ZC 2.0 limitations that have made it difficult if not impossible to develop serious business applications. Here�s what I saw:

A theme feature providing �canned� themes. At this time we will not have access to the CSS of a chosen theme, but there are controls for selecting colors, gradients and fonts. I was told that there is a mechanism for creating themes of your own. I would assume that some �coding� would be involoved, but that is just my assumption; I did not see this feature.

A layout feature for selecting an applications layout paradigm. For example, a navigation panel down the right or left side with tabs across the top; or just tabs or just side panels, etc. While this sets the default layout for your application, it appears that the layout for any given page can be different than the default, allowing for some pretty complex application interfaces.

Adding to the layout concept is a new view type known as HTML Page. This is exactly what it sounds like. You can create a static HTML page as a view. So? Wait for it... and using the new feature of embedding Forms & Views, you can use that html page to deliver dynamic content from your datastore. Can we finally display different form (record) types on the same page? Yes we can. I wish I had screenshots for you. This appears to be very powerful. It also permits you to add third party widgets to your pages and, I suspect, just about anything you can code or embed; YouTube, Flickr etc, etc, etc.

Did you ask for scriptable buttons? You got �em! While placement seems to be limited to the bottom of a form or view, using an html view with a table would seem to allow you to create a page providing the appearance of more layout choices for your buttons. The button scripts act on an onClick handler that can be programmed to do anything you can do in Deluge Script.

Did you ask for scriptable INSERT/DELETE for your records? It�s in there too. Since inserts (or adds as Zoho likes to call them) often require lots of lines of description to set values, the ZC team has created a very nice GUI to help you get that done, adding all the syntax etc.

Did you ask to sort the fetched record set? It�s in there. Its part of fetching and the �for each� control. In fact there�s also a �range� feature, for which I do not know the details.

One of my distractions has been list control. Well there is a whole palette of new List Manipulation Tools:

Create List
Add
Remove Index
Remove Element
Add All
Remove All
Clear
Sort
For Each Element
For Each Index

And I was told that we can now �set� multiline list or multiline checkbox form values in code. Please don�t ask what all of these tools do. We did not go deeply into each individual control. Some should be self-explanatory, the rest I�d just be guessing. But I�m really glad to see them all.

Client side functions have added:

Select
Deselect

Did you ask for scriptable sharing/unsharing? It�s in there. It is not clear if these new commands will take a variable; I sure hope so, because coding literal user id�s into Deluge will turn your code into a maintenance nightmare. At any rate this feature should help us with the granularity of our access control. I look forward to exploring ways to exploit this new feature. No mention of user �groups� was made. This would be an enormous help as well of course.

Did you ask for scriptable URL�s? There in there.
Get URL
Post (to) URL
Open URL (w/ same window/new window/parent window/popup window attributes)

And last but not least, though I may have missed something, is the new XPath Tool for executing XPath queries. We�ll all probably need some lessons in XPath, but its a very powerful feature.

�XPath (XML Path Language) is a language for selecting nodes from an XML document. In addition, XPath may be used to compute values (strings, numbers, or boolean values) from the content of an XML document.� Wikipedia

I should mention at this point that ALL of these new features are available via Script Builder as well as Free Flow Scripting. If you�re like me you use Script Builder to learn Deluge, then write parts of your code by hand in free-flow.

Yeah, but WHEN will we get this stuff? Here�s what I was told when I asked that question: there will be unannounced availability in about a week, with an official launch announcement a week later. Please don�t ask for more details about this because I simply don�t have them. It�s pretty clear the ZC team now understands that making predictions about rollouts is a slippery slope. We can only hope that these suggestions have the weight of reality behind them. I for one feel compelled to suspend serious coding until I can use these new features as much of what I want to do will require these new features. But the very fact that we will have them soon has sent me back to the drawing board anyway.

I feel the need to thank the ZC development team for this advance peek at ZC 3.0. At my request, they spent their Saturday evening talking with me for over an hour and indulged my many many questions. I hope that this post will help many of you who have been looking for answers. Feel free to ask questions. I have tried to tell you everything I know at this point, but your questions may prompt attention from the ZC team.

Sincerely and waiting for the deluge,

Tim Sadler