The SIMILE Widgets project has four nifty tools for Web developers who want to provide data visualization or to create exhibits from pictures, with minimal coding required.

The Timeline widget can be used to create a scrolling timeline to help visualize event or other "temporal" data. Timeline can be used for historical visualizations, such as the JFK Assassination timeline and life of Monet, or might be used by a project to visualize the development roadmap. Users interact with the timeline with their mouse scrollwheel or just by dragging the timeline. Each point on the timeline can contain further details that are displayed in a overlay pop-up.

Despite the fact that open source software is often criticized for offering too many choices, it's safe to say that people like to have options. This doesn't pertain solely to end-users -- developers, designers, and quality assurance professionals all have their personal preferences when it comes to development framework and languages.

That's where it tends to get complicated. Selenium Remote Control is an open source cross-browser, cross-platform functional testing framework. However, it's a testing tool geared primarily toward developers with automated functional testing and continuous integration processes in place. Installing, configuring and maintaining the Selenium framework takes precious resources away from application development and testing.

Today, Sauce Labs released its Sauce RC (Remote Control) 1.0 utility. It's a simple web interface enabling QA professionals and harried developers to easily configure, administer, and test their applications on Selenium.

JavaScript programmers, rejoice! It's been a good week for open source from big companies. Earlier this week Yahoo! released its Traffic Server it acquired from Inktomi, and now Google has unleashed Closure Tools. These are part of the toolset that Google uses to create JavaScript-heavy applications like Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Maps.