AJAX & Tables
http://developer.ebusiness-apps.com/
Demo:
If your data is online and you're always working with real data then it can make using XLS spreadsheets more useful.

What would happen to the application if you can always have live data?

Using AJAX you can have a fast user interface that looks like Excel. You can even copy & paste.

How do you synchronize?
It's possible to do some client side processing on the cells and then doing server side as well.

You can call this thing a cellular wiki.
Many cases of this are group calendars that can be found on the web.

What are the drivers for people to have a shared XLS?

• We have the technology, but why do it?
• It's not just excel shared; there are things that you can pull in.
• Like bug tracking software, you could do this in a shared environment
• You can RSS this, if you could add all your BaseCamp tasks here, then you could quickly select and modify them and share.
• You can share the graphs too
• It's not just pure excel, there's more here.

When people are managing and emailing back and forth

• You shouldn't do this; you can do this on the web and do it together
• Other times you may want better version control. If you are owning a document, then you want edits, but ultimately you want that control.
• Because we don't have shared documents, we may use SameTime; I can show online to people a spreadsheet. If I need a modification, I can make changes with them watching.

Features

• You can do things like change colors and lock cells.
• Why do things have to be a document? All that users care about is the data. If it’s stored in various web services, you need a more flexible way of sharing it. You may want to put different types of data together.
• Some web2.0 startups have different visions of people sharing this data

How fast can data be updated?
How many records are you scrolling through?

• 3000, but it doesn't matter. It gets cached

Is there a print preview?

How do you track users, for usability studies?
-You can do an AJAX based usability lab. For a lab based setting you can get everything on the server. Up to the detail of replaying the mouse of the user.
-You can serve ads based on it.

• look for their blog post on this topic.

Tools used for coding this demo:

• Eclipse
• FrontPage
• Textpad
• don't use any libraries, have your own.
• The original grid code they use is 5 years old

Challenge:
What does this make you think of?
What would your users want to do with this?

Which libraries are pulling away from the Pack?

• Dojo
• Scriptaculous
• Anything with Ruby on Rails
• DWR liked in the java space
• Commercial frameworks: Atlas, Microsoft

AJAX For
1. Collaboration with spreadsheet like interfaces

• Synchronization
• User(s) & findings & quotes & recommendations. Using this

2. Customer support

• tracking NNN problems
• prioritize, cluster, versioning

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