Now that Dabble DB supports full JSON data exports, I have decided to update my Office 2.0 setup. This gave me the opportunity to learn a little bit more about JavaScript programming, and I must say that I am quite impressed by the progress made by web browsers in recent years.

First, I added a new field describing my usage pattern for each application: Everyday, Frequently (at least once a week), and Occasionally (once a month). Then, I wrote a little bit of JavaScript that parses the JSON feeds for my setup and the master database of Office 2.0 applications. The tricky bit was to emulate a database JOIN across two tables. I won’t claim that it’s the most efficient bit of code ever written, but it certainly does the trick. Last but not least, I installed the Text Control plugin for WordPress, which allows me to embed JavaScript code into blog posts, while preventing WordPress to replace special characters by their browser-friendly equivalents. This ensures that the embedded JavaScript code executes properly.

The page describing my new Office 2.0 setup is now completely dynamic and took no more than an hour to put together. Granted, it required some basic JavaScript programming skills, but I would expect the good folks at Dabble DB to develop slightly more advanced view builders in the future that will allow one to achieve the same result without having to write any code.

Also, because the back-end database is a web service and the front-end user interface is entirely written in JavaScript, I did not have to use any server-side processing to get to that result. Before something like Dabble DB existed, one would have had to use a server-side scripting language such as ASP, JSP or PHP to code the data processing logic. Today, you can by-pass the middle-tier layer altogether and get your dynamic content syndicated from any static HTML page. Next step will be to provide similar capabilities for data entry into the database.

Author’s note: Rafe Needleman has a great article on Writely.