When I first discovered Zoho Creator, the idea of building a Web database that could be included in my own Web site sounded too good to be true. After a while, however, I found that I simply couldn’t get the content from my applications to display correctly for my site. I wanted more power to match the format of the content being displayed to my own site’s style. Using the standard iframe or javascript codes provided by Zoho Creator, the imported information simply wasn’t in the format I particularly wanted. Furthermore, I was disappointed that I couldn’t programmatically display certain information and hide other information.
Then, I discovered the power of JSON. According to Wikipedia, “JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) (Pronounced like Jason, IPA /d?e?s?n/) is a lightweight computer data interchange format. It is a text-based, human-readable format for representing simple data structures and associative arrays (called objects).” In simpler terms, the JSON feed from your Zoho Creator application is packaged into a single javascript variable. You can decipher the data from your application by parsing out the nested arrays. For a sample of the codes for parsing this information, please see below:
