Charts and Maps for Dabble DB
Thursday, February 8th 2007 | Ismael Ghalimi
A couple of weeks ago, I described how to use Zoho Sheet alongside Dabble DB in order to generate charts that can be dynamically embedded into any web page. Well, it turns out that I was not the only one interested by such a features, and the good folks at Dabble DB just released support for charts and maps.
In order to get a feel for how it works, the best is to watch this short screencast, which shows examples for both charts and maps. I was most interested by the map feature, and used it to depict where Intalio does business around the world. As it turns out, we have customers on all six continents, in 21 different countries. The following map of the world shows their geographic distribution.
When using the Dabble DB user interface directly, you can also drill down to the level of individual continents, then publish the resulting map. For example, here is where we do business in Europe. And when you click on a country, the Dabble DB user interface takes you directly to a table view where you see the list of customers in the selected country. It could not be any better.
Currently, the set of charts and maps supported by Dabble DB is fairly limited, but the system works very well, and is absolutely trivial to use. Dabble DB is smart enough to parse complex address fields and extract states and coutries from them, making chart and map generation as easy to use as any other feature currently offered by this great online database. Down the road, I hope that more configuration options will be offered, and that charts and maps will keep the clean look they have right now.
Andrew, Avi: congratulations, you’ve raised the bar once again.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Hi,
Thanks for the heads up on a cool Dabble DB feature. You might also be interested by EditGrid, which allows placement of dynamic graphs and sheets in web pages.
Regards
-Al
EditGrid is the first, as I am aware of, web-based spreadsheet that supports multi-lingual capabilities, but is has some distance to go in terms of supporting multi-lingual properly. It would be even better if EditGrid also complied with the W3C’s accessibility standard (WAI—Web Accessibility Initiative).
The incorporation of charts and maps into Dabble DB looks like the first attempt at webifying primitive GIS (Geograpic Information System) features of Microsoft’s map component in Office Suite or Corel’s map component in CorelDraw—all are of the Office 1.0 genre. I don’t know how much effort and code were required to extend the drill-down capability. Without macro and OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) capabilities, I believe that revision of underlying codes is needed to reflect the currency of charts and maps. This is another problem in synchronization, as mentioned elsewhere, perhaps.
Web 2.0 and Office 2.0 do provide prettier user interfaces, but they still have a long way to go to catch up with the capabilities offered by Office 1.0 in terms of usability and productivity from an end-user’s perspective. Microsoft and its counterparts are not sitting still, they have already moved into the Web 2.0 and Office 2.0 sphere. I haven’t evaluated Office 2007’s full capabilities and its web support yet. It is quite possible that Microsoft still has some distance to go in making Office Suite totally web-based, and preserving some Office 1.0 capabilities. As an end-user advocate, I would like to see how the so-called open-source Office 2.0 movement will play out against Microsoft. History may repeat itself similar to Netscape browser’s fate! Netscape charged for downloads before IE was released to the market. When IE became available for free, and supported better user interfaces, Netscape lost market share and never recaptured its glory days, even when it became free.
It would be interesting to see when IBM officially goes all the way to Java and Linux. It standardized its global user workstation internally to Windows NT-based workstations and Microsoft Office from OS/2 and Lotus Office Suite about 10 years ago. It may have already done so again by switching all the way to OpenDoc and Linux workstations!
[…] Dabble DB: Dabble DB is developed by a small company from Vancouver, BC, and can be considered as a pioneer in the area of AJAX-based online databases. The founders have taken a radical approach to solving the problem of managing data online through simple metaphors, and came up with what I believe to be the simplest user interface out there. They were also the first to introduce a variety of feeds for your data, in multiple formats including CSV, JSON, PDF, RSS, and Text. More recently, they added support for charts and maps, giving us a good preview for what online Business Intelligence (BI) might look like down the road. Developer’s tip: the default JSON feed has a .json extension, but if you replace it by a .js extension, the resulting feed might be easier to parse in JavaScript. […]
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed
Leave a Comment