OStatic

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.

The latest means to create desktop-style Web applications using JavaScript was announced last week, and has created quite a flurry of excitement. Cappuccino, an open-source application framework, was released by the programmers at 280 North, a Web startup that has been using Cappuccino in its own development. Cappuccino, as the FAQ states, is released under the Lesser GNU Public License. This license ensures that while the Cappuccino framework itself will remain open source, applications written using it may be released under any license, without restrictions.

Client-side Web developers work mainly in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, displaying and manipulating data within a Web browser, while retrieving and storing that data on the server. One exciting new entry on this front is SproutCore, a new JavaScript framework that brings a full model-view-controller (MVC) approach to client-side programming. SproutCore gained a great deal of public attention in the last week, since Apple announced that its new MobileMe (formerly .Mac) service uses it.