Six Reasons To Look Past Caspio
August 18th, 2008 | Published in Journalism | 20 Comments
Be sure to catch Caspio’s David Milliron’s responses at Mindy’s site.
Mindy asks for some bullet points on why news organizations would do better to not use Caspio for their Web database needs. Feel free to add on:
- SEO. If you like building databases that are not indexed by Google and other search engines, then Caspio’s right for you. Go ahead, Google “Powered by Caspio“.
- Owning vs. Renting. You will never stop paying for Caspio unless you quit it entirely. And then you’ll still need to rewrite your apps. All you’ve gained is more work.
- You will need programming. Caspio says “no more programming,” but to do anything beyond basic search and display, you will need some. Oh, but you can’t get access to that functionality during a free trial.
- Like using Flash? Caspio doesn’t.
- Nickel and Dime. Zip code searching costs $150 to setup and $50 a month.
- As my boss and friend Aron says, “We can’t outsource our future.” By choosing Caspio, you’re dependent upon them to add features, and while they do, they add them for all users, too. So much for differentiation.
And here’s a bonus quote from Jacob Kaplan-Moss, one of Django‘s lead developers, who admittedly has a bias in this area. But still, it’s a very telling quote: “I’ve actually stopped being all that concerned about Caspio: each new Caspio customer is one more competitor my paper doesn’t have to worry about.”
Now, I’m sure there are six reasons to use Caspio, but I don’t think they stack up in the long term. I think they leave you with more work, not less, and with apps that you have to spend valuable time making look different from everybody else who uses Caspio.
August 18th, 2008 at 9:44 pm (#)
From my perspective (programmer for online news), the #1 reason NOT to use caspio is it empowers everyone to create databases of information. While this, in itself, isn’t a bad thing, when reporters feel as if creating amazing database applications are easy, they not only devalue the work the programmers do, but also step on their toes. While the reporter is building databases of information and mashing it up in interesting ways (ie. Fun Stuff), the programmer (me) is relegated to munging templates and piddling his time way (ie. Not Fun Stuff).
Is this selfish? Probably. Is it important to keep your programmers mildly interested in their day to day activities? I think so.
August 19th, 2008 at 6:02 am (#)
[...] Derek has written a brief, clear post (which even a dabbler such as I can understand) about why using Caspio might NOT be the ideal [...]
August 19th, 2008 at 3:26 pm (#)
Derek,
I recently had a conversation with a newsy web editor who said something along the lines of “somebody needs to make an open source, fuller-featured caspio that doesn’t drive people crazy.”
What’s your answer to something like that? What kind of “space,” for lack of a better word, do you see between Caspio’s browser based GUI approach and the supposedly daunting Dive Into Django?
August 19th, 2008 at 4:21 pm (#)
Interesting question. On one hand, I think that Django and Rails could do better showing exactly how quick it is to set up a browsable app via generic views or databrowse in Django or just the conventional routing in Rails. But the gap won’t be completely filled, imho, until there’s a search functionality for those frameworks that’s a defacto standard. Sounds simple, but it’s not, and it’s one place where standardizing on a single db platform as Caspio does helps simplify things a bit.
When a third-party or contributed search app for Django becomes a near-standard (I doubt just one will make it into trunk), then that might go a long way towards making that gap smaller.
Developers could also create site/platform-specific search apps that take, say, a CSV file and create a search app from it. That’s being done today; it’s just that it usually requires a few commands rather than point-and-click.
As Justin says above, to make this almost *too* easy can lead to 1,001 nearly identical data apps, which isn’t really an ideal situation. But there are a few steps that could narrow that space a bit, if not close it completely.
August 20th, 2008 at 6:50 am (#)
I love this! Programmers are afraid of an enabling technology. This is hilarious.
The web gave everyone a tool to put printers/publisher out of work. Caspio has created a tool/service to put low-level programmers out of work.
If you want to unseat them, re-invent their technology, I dare you.
Of course, if you did put the time into such a project, especially open-source, you would still be displacing your brother progrmmers, so I doubt anyone will pick up that gauntlet.
August 20th, 2008 at 7:30 am (#)
I think you just made Justin’s point for him, “editor.” You wanna explain how open-source displaces programmers, or was that the extent of your insight on the subject?
August 20th, 2008 at 9:19 am (#)
I feel as if I need to defend my point.
The web merely lowers the barrier to entry for people to get into online publishing. It doesn’t, however, lower the standards we as a community have. That’s why you have sites like http://havenworks.com put out by people who are “technologically enabled”. http://portfolio.com , on the other hand, is put out by someone with chops. Someone who knows what they’re doing.
If you slight the amount of work and knowledge involved in putting out a good product with phrases such as “No more programming for custom web applications”, you’re going to end up with a communist—”everyone gets the same thing”—style future.
Do you think http://everyblock.com would run on caspio? No! It takes knowledgeable people putting in actual effort to create something interesting.
But don’t take my word for it: http://www.jacobian.org/writing/2007/sep/12/db-journalism/
Caspio is to developers as Blogger.com is to journalism.
August 20th, 2008 at 11:10 am (#)
[...] Granted, this post only makes sense if your organization is using Caspio (or planning to). But this post from the blog “The Scoop” is pretty damn funny is you’re familiar with the [...]
August 20th, 2008 at 11:38 pm (#)
By Dan D. Gutierrez
CEO of HostedDatabase.com
This blog entry is very interesting to me. When my firm launched the web’s first Database-as-a-Service offering in 1999 (before Caspio), we did tout our service as something that would let a company avoid programming. But that was only part of the story. For small businesses that needed a web database on the cheap, they would generally just forget about the need if they need to spend bucks on a developer. But they’d use our service instead. Now after a while, many of our customers out grew our service and eventually did build a custom web app. That’s fine to us, we just provided an alternative in the early going.
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:06 pm (#)
In my mind, this problem of whether to outsource your database is similar to the current temptation to let external Web 2.0 organizations handle other parts of your IT infrastructure. Good image hosting too hard? Use Flickr! Good video hosting too expensive? Use YouTube! Building a social network too hard? Use Ning! Then you turn around and realize your content and IT is in the hands of half a dozen external firms, subject to changes in their terms of service, their censorship policies, or (worst case) them going out of business.
See Giving Away the Farm, on this “Web 2.0 as sharecropping” trend.
External tools have their place, but I’d be reluctant to put my publication’s eggs in that basket. Publications embracing doesn’t mean you don’t have to invest in it / master it.
December 5th, 2008 at 2:12 am (#)
[...] are using Caspio to create and host data apps, sans programming. I am not a fan, for reasons Derek Willis sums up much better than I could, but if you have no other options, it’s better than sitting on your [...]
January 5th, 2009 at 5:17 am (#)
[...] are using Caspio to create and host data apps, sans programming. I am not a fan, for reasons Derek Willis sums up much better than I could, but if you have no other options, it’s better than sitting on your [...]
March 28th, 2010 at 11:46 pm (#)
[...] where others are coming from who believe we can do better (see Derek Willis’ posts here for some quick bullet points, or here for a longer explanation, to learn more about this [...]
June 30th, 2010 at 2:57 pm (#)
As a Caspio client I can say this is a great alternative to hiring one or two developers to create a database for you. I’ve done it both ways and there are always issues no matter which way you go, however I got more from our Caspio team than trying to do it ourselves. We developed and launched our internal and external apps in 2 months compared to 4-6 using in house people.
November 24th, 2010 at 6:33 pm (#)
As Dan mentioned, we used ‘caspio-like’ technology in the early days and eventually outgrew it. Today we’re using a code generator (www.ironspeed.com) to build custom web apps. It generates a standard crud app and gives us the flexibility to customize.
January 14th, 2011 at 10:42 am (#)
[...] Six Reasons To Look Past Caspio :: The Scoop [...]
April 21st, 2011 at 12:51 pm (#)
So, as a current Caspio customer, I have to disagree with the majority of this article. Maybe its just because this article is outdated or written from a perspective of feeling threatened by Caspio’s happy customers, which seems to be a lot of people. First off, Caspio actually has a pretty good SEO tool, has saved us so much time/money and is well worth the low-monthly subscription, has unlimited users unlike all the others, and the best part, it allows us to do really powerful stuff without having to code or be a programmer. However, we have brought in programmers to quickly build API integrations to do even cooler stuff. Not sure why, developers feel threatened, when instead shouldn’t they be inspired to innovate. And when it comes down to it, the focus should be on helping the end business user, not saving your job. The value achieved from cloud computing and DaaS has been proven. And, I dont think the guy who made black/white TVs was so upset when Color TVs came out and took over his product line. Developers will always be needed, desired, and appreciated…but just in different places.
July 14th, 2011 at 11:31 am (#)
I like both sides of this post. Both are right.
One one hand, after data was gathered by sports staff it took me 35 minutes to use Caspio to put together a submit and update admin to allow them to update it.
On the other, I built full well knowing the ceiling was limited and wanting to know how to roll with a django backend to really see what this thing can do. Unfortunately that takes longer than 35 minutes.
But I have the want, will and some background to move in the latter direction. Now I just need time to get there.
July 19th, 2011 at 11:28 am (#)
I just found this post, looking literally for alternatives to Caspio! I agree wholeheartedly with Derek but I find unexpected resistance from editors who have come to expect “data” that sits in a limited area embedded on a page and has no further links to worry about. Some also seem to like the generic-ness of it, that instead of showing information, you display a choice like “Choose a county” that can be handed out to nearby newspapers without a change. As much as I rebel against that idea (why not feed me a variable I can use to detect the publication and customize it?) against my better judgment I feel like I should have a non-Caspio option with the same functionality. Has anybody tried just replicating functionality, by opening a div with a search form, and popping the results right into the div?
I see a discussion here
July 21st, 2011 at 3:09 pm (#)
Why do I have to find this post every time I am trying to find an answer on how to do something…? Great post, and David’s responses are also enlightening.