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Archive for the ‘JavaScript’ Category

Zimki – the spirt lives on …

Posted in JavaScript, Ruby, Web2.0, news, programming, tagged , , , , , , on December 13, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Although Zimki is to shut down on Christmas Eve, the ideas behind the service live on. Two new offerings, Horuku and AppJet, offer variations on the idea of hosted application development/deployment.
AppJet, funded by Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator, is very similar to Zimki, being a server-side JavaScript platform. No details yet as to what [...]

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JavaScript as an Excel scripting language via ExcelDNA

Posted in JavaScript, VBA, excel, tagged , , , , , , on October 4, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Developing .NET DLLs that are to be used within an Excel VBA add-in is relatively easy to do. But the overhead of the COM managed interfaces can be a serious performance bottleneck if the .NET managed functions are called from within a tight loop. The alternative is to create a C++ XLL and [...]

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Zimki – R.I.P.

Posted in GAFyD, JavaScript, tagged on September 25, 2007 | 1 Comment »

Zimki, the London based innovative JavaScript application hosting service is to close down this Christmas Eve. Not surprising really, the announcement last June to stop the proposed open sourcing of the platform and the parent company’s (Canon Europe) decision to order a review on the future direction of Zimki looked ominous at the time. [...]

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Zimki – trust and hope.

Posted in GAFyD, JavaScript, tagged on June 16, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

Fotango’s Chief Operating Officer, Simon Wardle, writes further about the decision to delay open sourcing Zimki on his personal blog. I’ve decided to look at the situation form a glass-half-full perspective; hey it’s still free, professionally managed, easy to use; I’ve some really useful web services running on it and the rest are static [...]

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Zimki – goes off the boil.

Posted in JavaScript, Web2.0, news, tagged on June 14, 2007 | 1 Comment »

Looks like any further enhancement of Zimki is to be put on hold until Fotango’s parent company, Canon Europe, completes a review on the future direction (and viability?) of the hosted application market. This means the platform will not be open sourced in the near future. This and the lack of any sign [...]

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Google Gears – SQLite Killer App

Posted in ETL, JavaScript, Proto, SQLite, excel, kettle on May 31, 2007 | 1 Comment »

The announcement of Google Gears is of course a game changer for those working in the development of online apps; its addition to Goggle Reader alone would make it worth while for me and I’m sure we’ll see it integrated into Google Docs and GMail in the near future. If you had any plans [...]

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Talend vs. Kettle (Pentaho PDI)

Posted in BI, ETL, Java, JavaFX, JavaScript, Palo, Ruby, SQLite, Talend, kettle, xLite, tagged on May 27, 2007 | 5 Comments »

Over the last few weeks I’ve received a lot of traffic from Goggle searches comparing Talend and Kettle and also from Vincent McBurney’s ITtoolbox article comparing the two products, so where do I stand?
As ETL tools they take different approaches, Kettle is a meta data driven framework (which is in turn tightly integrated into an [...]

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JavaFX – a GUI DSL

Posted in ETL, Java, JavaFX, JavaScript, Ruby, SQLite, Talend, VBA, excel, programming on May 19, 2007 | 4 Comments »

Having mastered JavaScript (OK master is too strong a word – having become comfortable with both its syntax and usage patterns) my next port of call is JavaFX the recently announced Flash/Silverlight competitor. What led me to JavaFX Script was not its role in this Flash/AJAX alternative platform (which unless  Sun improves [...]

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JavaScript 101

Posted in JavaScript, education, programming on May 12, 2007 | 2 Comments »

In a previous post I explained why I had decided to improve my JavaScript skills. The problem was finding a decent reference book as the ones I had looked at where amongst the worst technical books I had ever encountered; then I found this series of lectures by Douglas Crawford. Not only are the [...]

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More Google Goodness

Posted in JavaScript, data, news, tagged on April 18, 2007 | 1 Comment »

Another interesting Google announcement, this time an AJAX feed API. The API essentially provides the same functionality as Yahoo Pipes but without the user-friendly UI i.e. the ability to create mashups without the need for server-side proxy code. Currently it supplies RSS and ATOM feeds normalised to an ATOM-like JSON output, but [...]

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VBA & JavaScript – glue languages

Posted in JavaScript, Proto, excel, kettle, programming, tagged , on March 22, 2007 | 2 Comments »

What have Javascript and VBA in common? Not much on the surface and their respective user bases rarely if ever overlap. What they do share are their roles as the imperative (the-if-then-else-loop-etc) programming languages of the “I’m not a programmer” programmers, the great unwashed, the “normal” people out there who [...]

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