A Behind the Scenes Look at Zoho Creator

A Behind the Scenes Look at Zoho Creator

In this post, I want to provide a behind-the-scenes look at Zoho Creator, a sense of what all of our engineers are doing.

First, to step back, Zoho Creator was born of an idea I had way back in 2002. I sketched out the underpinning of a programming language, with some strongly held convictions born of my own experience. In the beginning, that language had no syntax at all - it was living purely as a set of database tables. In programming language parlance, I had defined the "abstract syntax" of the language, without bothering to define a concrete syntax. In a way, the Deluge language had soul, but no body yet.  I started an experimental project some time around 2003-2004. Zoho Creator itself was launched in 2006. 

Unlike competing systems born at that time, Zoho Creator was not simply a form/view builder. It always had more power than that, as expressed by Deluge, which is why it has endured and thrived. 

The most important aspect of evolution over the years has been in the runtime environment. Deluge has evolved from an interpreter to a just-in-time compiler, which was essential in achieving decent runtime performance. This took a fairly substantial effort, many many staff-years of R&D. We still want to speed it up much more, and there is ongoing R&D work in caching, scheduling and so on to speed things up further.

Scalability is another major area where we have spent a substantial amount of effort, consuming the majority of our team's time. Originally Deluge ran only on an SQL database. Today, it uses many different kinds of storage systems underneath, using each for what it does best. Distributed file systems, NoSQL systems, caching systems and of course SQL databases all play a role. We have also done integration with Zoho Reports, which uses is own engine underneath.

Now consider these two big items: moving from an interpreter to a just-in-time environment, and expanding beyond SQL database to multiple forms of storage. Normally these would have been highly disruptive to application developers, because we are basically doing brain surgery on the core system. The changes are essential because that was the only way we could keep the environment scaling and offering acceptable performance, while keeping our infrastructure costs reasonable so we can continue to be affordable to our growing user base.

We have pulled these off without major disruptions. I acknowledge we have had disruptions but I think the vast majority of our users, certainly any fair-minded observer, would agree they have been minor, and they were fixed fairly quickly.  While any disruption is painful to our user community, and we take our responsibility of running this platform seriously, I want to emphasize that this whole cloud platform technology is still evolving rapidly, and a lot of R&D effort is going into it to make it really bullet-proof.  This is true not just in Zoho, but across the industry. 

Now what is ahead over the next few years? I am personally working on what I call Deluge NG - the next generation of Deluge that I hope would offer much more expressive power, while at the same time being as accessible as Deluge today. My goal is to empower the "casual programmer" or even power user to get a lot more done, without having to get a Computer Science degree. It is still early days on Deluge NG, but as it matures, I will post a series of articles on it. We will offer an experimental version of it online, running on a separate instance from the present Creator, so people can get a taste of what is coming. 

For those technically inclined, the driving theme of Deluge, present in an underlying, unexposed form in the present version, but fully brought to the surface in Deluge NG, is the idea of a fully queryable type system. Basically every type, every piece of data, in your program is fully queryable in Deluge, using a very expressive query syntax. The vision behind this queryable type system is that most of what you express in loops should really be queries on your data, and it is the lack of query power in languages that forces you to build explicit loops. For a variety of reasons that I won't get into here, explicit loops are a major design smell in my world, and I want our Deluge developers to be able to avoid them as much as possible. 

I will conclude this post with one thing: Zoho Creator is the most important, most challenging piece of technology developed by Zoho. I have personally spent a decade of my technical life on it. It still has a long way to go to fulfill my original vision, but programming language platforms are hard. We have taken up this challenge because we have deeply held convictions on this subject, a near-religious belief that we can redefine the way we create world-class business applications. As with any religious belief, faith is needed; without that faith, nothing worthwhile is possible.

Sridhar



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