Introduction to Catalyst

Overview

Zoho Catalyst is a full stack cloud-based serverless development tool that provides backend functionalities to build microservices and applications in various platforms. Catalyst adapts a BaaS (Backend as a Service) model and provides pre-written, universal, server-side components from a unified interface as programmable elements.

Zoho Catalyst manages server-side components and provides functionalities like database management, cloud storage, push notifications, cron scheduler, OCR integration, web client hosting, analytics, and more, which can easily be incorporated into an application’s code.

Catalyst allows the developer to focus more on designing the user experience of the serverless applications, instead of investing time and effort into setting up and maintaining the server-side components. The developers don’t need to build and manage servers or storage solutions manually or worry about the infrastructure their applications are built on.

Using the SDKs that Zoho Catalyst provides, developers can customize the already functional server-side behavior to their needs, build on the ready-made components that are provided, and seamlessly integrate those backend functionalities into their applications. This enables a significantly faster and more cost-effective application building process.

Applications built on top of Zoho Catalyst are robust, secure, scalable, and highly reliable. Catalyst can be accessed easily via a GUI console called the Catalyst console or from a CLI in your terminal.

Features

Zoho Catalyst provides the following backend services:

Develop

1. Authentication

2. Data Store

3. File Store

4. Cache

5. Cron

6. ZCQL Console

Compute

1. Functions

2. Circuits

3. Security Rules

Amplify

1. Search Integration

2. Mail

3. Push Notifications

4. Event Listeners

5. GitHub Integration

Discover

Zia Services

1. AutoML

2. Face Analytics

3. Optical Character Recognition

4. Image Moderation

5. Object Recognition

6. Barcode Scanner

Add-on Services

1. API Gateway

2. Mobile Device Management

3. Crashes

4. Application Performance Monitoring

Host and Manage

1. Web Client Hosting

2. Domain Mappings

3. Logs

4. Metrics

Supported Environments

You can develop applications for the following environments using Zoho Catalyst:

1. Web

2. Android

3. iOS

Supported Programming Languages and Frameworks

You can develop server-side functions in the following programming languages and frameworks:

1. Java

2. Node.js