Every once in a while, you come across a new application that is so well thought out, so clean, and so powerful, that you wish everything else was built like it. Last time I got this feeling was for Dabble DB, the best Office 2.0 database money can buy. And today, the same happened again when I followed Emily Chang’s recommendation and discovered Timeline, an AJAX widget for visualizing time-based events developed by David François Huynh.

As an example, the timeline displayed above outlines major events that contributed to the development of Intalio. The upper and lower bands scroll in synchrony, and the timeline starts on July 31, 1999, date when Intalio was first incorporated in the State of Delaware.

David’s tool can be used to create extremely detailed timelines, such as this Religion Timeline, or this one about Dinausors. Quite frankly, I find it very impressive, not only for the fact that it’s open source (BSD License).

Even better, Timeline supports JSON feeds. As soon as I find some free time, I will try to integrate it with Dabble DB, which would remove the need for coding XML data feeds by hand, as I did for Intalio’s timeline.

And when Intalio’s engineering folks will have some free time as well, I will ask them to see if we could use it for extending our Business Activity Monitoring framework. Showing events that occurred in relation to a process on a neatly-formatted timeline would be kinda cool, isn’t it?

David, congratulations for an amazing piece of work! This is awesome!