Zoho 223
The Facebook web site currently has more than 175 million active users
worldwide. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school,
and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add
friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify
friends about themselves. The web site’s name refers to the paper facebooks
depicting members of a campus community that some U.S. colleges and
preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to
get to know other people on campus.
Facebook serves up over 50 billion page views a month while employ-
ing fewer than 200 engineers. It is the second most-trafficked PHP hyper-
text preprocessor site in the world (Yahoo is number 1), and it is one of the
world’s largest MySQL installations, running thousands of databases. In
terms of total photo page views, Facebook exceeds all of the next-largest
photo sites combined. It is the largest photo-sharing site in the United
States, with over a billion photos. Facebook is the fourth most-trafficked
web site in the United States, and Facebook users upload more than 14 mil-
lion new photos every day. It is also the largest user in the world of
mem-
cached,
an open source caching system originally developed by LiveJournal.
It is obvious from these statistics that the engineering team at Facebook is
pushing the limits of IT engineering. They have created a custom-built
search engine capable of processing millions of queries a day, completely
distributed and entirely in-memory with real-time updates.
8.5.1 Facebook Development
Facebook provides anyone the ability to create Facebook applications. A user
can get a basic application up and running in minutes. To create a Facebook
application, you should be well versed in PHP or some other coding lan-
guage such as Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, or Python. It is preferable to know
one that already has a client library for the Facebook API. You will need to
have a basic understanding of the Internet, SSH, MySQL, and Unix.
8.6 Zoho
Zoho is an office productivity suite from AdventNet, Inc., which was
founded in 1996. The Zoho product is supported by over 120 developers.
To date, Zoho has launched 15 different applications, and more are in the
works. When you first go to the Zoho web site, you see the page shown in
Figure 8.6.
Chap8.fm Page 223 Friday, May 22, 2009 11:28 AM
224 Cloud Computing
From the home page you can create an account or sign in. After signing
into Zoho, quite a few options are available to you. For example, signing into
Zoho Mail, as shown in Figure 8.7, provides you with a rich set of features.
Figure 8.6 The Zoho home page. (
Source
: wwwzoho.com.)
Figure 8.7 Zoho Mail home page.
Chap8.fm Page 224 Friday, May 22, 2009 11:28 AM
Zoho 225
Zoho Mail provides ample storage space. You can store and search
through every email you have ever sent or received, and it offers offline sup-
port so you can take your mail with you. You can read and compose emails
without an active Internet connection and send them out once you are con-
nected. Zoho Mail supports both traditional folders as well as labels. A label
is a type of folder that you can customize by both name and color.
Zoho Mail offers advanced, self-learning algorithms that keep
unwanted spam out of your inbox and deliver only legitimate emails. Using
Zoho, you can have a personalized email address or create one using the
zoho.com domain. Also, there is support for mobile users. Zoho Mail can
be read from an iPhone, and support for other mobile phones is expected
this year. Integrated instant messaging (IM) is available, so you can send
instant messages from within Zoho Mail and, best of all, you don’t need to
download a separate client.
8.6.1 Zoho CloudSQL
CloudSQL is a technology that allows developers to interact with business
data stored across Zoho Services using the familiar SQL language. Unlike
other methods for accessing data in the cloud, CloudSQL encourages devel-
opers to leverage the years of experience they have with the SQL language.
CloudSQL allows businesses to connect and integrate the data and applica-
tions they have in Zoho with the data and applications they have in-house,
Figure 8.8 The inbox for Zoho mail.
Chap8.fm Page 225 Friday, May 22, 2009 11:28 AM
226 Cloud Computing
or even with other SaaS services. This leads to faster deployments and easier
integration projects. CloudSQL is offered as an extension to the existing
Zoho web API. It is meant to be used by developers, not end users. Cloud-
SQL supports multiple database dialects (e.g., ANSI, Oracle, Microsoft
SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Informix). The main
purpose of the SQL Interpreter component is to translate SQL statements
that are executed by a third-party application into a neutral dialect that can
be understood by any of the individual Zoho services. The federation layer
understands and handles service-specific query delegation and result aggre-
gation. The federation layer enables a query to span across multiple Zoho
services to fetch data in an aggregated manner, thus virtualizing different
Zoho services so they appear as a single service.
Each of the specific Zoho services (i.e., Zoho CRM, Zoho Creator,
Zoho Reports) comprises the last layer of the CloudSQL architecture. They
collect, store, and mine business data consumed by Zoho users and develop-
ers. The services execute the query against their data store and pass the
results back to the CloudSQL middleware. The services take care of autho-
rizing each query to verify whether the user who is executing the query has
permission to access or manipulate the data on which the query is executed.
8.7 DimDim Collaboration
Dimdim
12
invested more than 15 person-years of engineering development
into making a product to support complex web meetings. This free service
lets anyone communicate using rich media in real time. Unlike competing
web conference products, Dimdim does not require users to install software
on their computers in order to attend a web meeting. Users can start or join
meetings using only a few mouse clicks.
Dimdim is available as open source software, and it already integrates
with CRM and LMS software so it can be extended easily. It is extremely
flexible, available in hosted and on-site configurations, and easily customiz-
able. Dimdim Open Source Community Edition v4.5, code named “Lib-
erty,” is meant for developers and highly technical enthusiasts, and for use
in noncritical environments. It has nearly all of the features touted by the
commercial version of Dimdim (Enterprise) and is based on open source
streaming and media components. Dimdim Enterprise is based on commer-
cial streaming and media components (Adobe Flash Server) and runs on top
12. http://www.dimdim.com.
Chap8.fm Page 226 Friday, May 22, 2009 11:28 AM
DimDim Collaboration 227
of their SynchroLive Communication Platform. The open source commu-
nity supports the Open Source Community Edition.
Dimdim has a simple user interface that is easy for presenters and
attendees to learn. Meeting hosts and attendees do not have to install any-
thing to broadcast audio or video, because all that is needed is a very tiny
plug-in (which is required only if you want to share your desktop.) The free
version is not a limited-feature trial product. Dimdim Free boasts a power-
ful feature set that allows anyone to host meetings with up to 20 people
simultaneously using diversified platforms such as Mac, Windows, and
Linux. Signing up to use Dimdim is easy, as shown in Figure 8.9: Simply go
to the web site and fill in the requested information.
If you already have an account, you can just use your existing informa-
tion. Otherwise, you can create one in a few clicks and sign in. Once you sign
into Dimdim, you will see the home screen, which will look like Figure 8.10.
To start a meeting with Dimdim, simply click the Host Meeting but-
ton, as shown in Figure 8.11. Provide a name for the meeting and an agenda
and then enter the email addresses of the attendees. Next, choose a key to
Figure 8.9 The Dimdim sign-in page. (
Source
: http://www.dimdim.com.)
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