Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

March 13, 2013

JSNetworkX

Filed under: D3,Graphs,Javascript,Networks,NetworkX — Patrick Durusau @ 12:39 pm

JSNetworkX

A port of the NetworkX graph library to JavaScript

SNetworkX is a port of the popular Python graph library NetworkX. Lets describe it with their words:

NetworkX is a Python language software package for the creation, manipulation, and study of the structure, dynamics, and function of complex networks.

With NetworkX you can load and store networks in standard and nonstandard data formats, generate many types of random and classic networks, analyze network structure, build network models, design new network algorithms, draw networks, and much more.

Github.

Wiki.

Looks like an easy way to include graph representations of topic maps in a web page.

I suspect you will be seeing more of this in the not too distant future.

I first saw this in a tweet by Christophe Viau.

March 8, 2013

Crossfilter

Filed under: Data Mining,Dataset,Filters,Javascript,Top-k Query Processing — Patrick Durusau @ 4:34 pm

Crossfilter: Fast Multidimensional Filtering for Coordinated Views

From the webpage:

Crossfilter is a JavaScript library for exploring large multivariate datasets in the browser. Crossfilter supports extremely fast (<30ms) interaction with coordinated views, even with datasets containing a million or more records; we built it to power analytics for Square Register, allowing merchants to slice and dice their payment history fluidly.

Since most interactions only involve a single dimension, and then only small adjustments are made to the filter values, incremental filtering and reducing is significantly faster than starting from scratch. Crossfilter uses sorted indexes (and a few bit-twiddling hacks) to make this possible, dramatically increasing the perfor­mance of live histograms and top-K lists. For more details on how Crossfilter works, see the API reference.

See the webpage for an impressive demonstration with a 5.3 MB dataset.

Is there a trend towards “big data” manipulation on clusters and “less big data” in browsers?

Will be interesting to see how the benchmarks for “big” and “less big” move over time.

I first saw this in Nat Torkington’s Four Short links: 4 March 2013.

February 22, 2013

typeahead.js [Autocompletion Library]

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Javascript,JQuery,Search Interface,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 1:58 pm

typeahead.js

From the webpage:

Inspired by twitter.com‘s autocomplete search functionality, typeahead.js is a fast and fully-featured autocomplete library.

Features

  • Displays suggestions to end-users as they type
  • Shows top suggestion as a hint (i.e. background text)
  • Works with hardcoded data as well as remote data
  • Rate-limits network requests to lighten the load
  • Allows for suggestions to be drawn from multiple datasets
  • Supports customized templates for suggestions
  • Plays nice with RTL languages and input method editors

Why not use X?

At the time Twitter was looking to implement a typeahead, there wasn’t a solution that allowed for prefetching data, searching that data on the client, and then falling back to the server. It’s optimized for quickly indexing and searching large datasets on the client. That allows for sites without datacenters on every continent to provide a consistent level of performance for all their users. It plays nicely with Right-To-Left (RTL) languages and Input Method Editors (IMEs). We also needed something instrumented for comprehensive analytics in order to optimize relevance through A/B testing. Although logging and analytics are not currently included, it’s something we may add in the future.

A bit on the practical side for me, ;-), but I can think of several ways that autocompletion could be useful with a topic map interface.

Not just the traditional completion of a search term or phrase but offering possible roles for subjects already in a map and other uses.

If experience with XML and OpenOffice is any guide, the easier authoring becomes (assuming the authoring outcome is useful), the greater the adoption of topic maps.

It really is that simple.

I first saw this at: typeahead.js : Fully-featured jQuery Autocomplete Library.

February 3, 2013

Scribl: an HTML5 Canvas-based graphics library…

Filed under: Genomics,Graphics,HTML5,Javascript,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 6:57 pm

Scribl: an HTML5 Canvas-based graphics library for visualizing genomic data over the web by Chase A. Miller, Jon Anthony, Michelle M. Meyer and Gabor Marth. (Bioinformatics (2013) 29 (3): 381-383. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bts677)

Abstract:

Motivation: High-throughput biological research requires simultaneous visualization as well as analysis of genomic data, e.g. read alignments, variant calls and genomic annotations. Traditionally, such integrative analysis required desktop applications operating on locally stored data. Many current terabyte-size datasets generated by large public consortia projects, however, are already only feasibly stored at specialist genome analysis centers. As even small laboratories can afford very large datasets, local storage and analysis are becoming increasingly limiting, and it is likely that most such datasets will soon be stored remotely, e.g. in the cloud. These developments will require web-based tools that enable users to access, analyze and view vast remotely stored data with a level of sophistication and interactivity that approximates desktop applications. As rapidly dropping cost enables researchers to collect data intended to answer questions in very specialized contexts, developers must also provide software libraries that empower users to implement customized data analyses and data views for their particular application. Such specialized, yet lightweight, applications would empower scientists to better answer specific biological questions than possible with general-purpose genome browsers currently available.

Results: Using recent advances in core web technologies (HTML5), we developed Scribl, a flexible genomic visualization library specifically targeting coordinate-based data such as genomic features, DNA sequence and genetic variants. Scribl simplifies the development of sophisticated web-based graphical tools that approach the dynamism and interactivity of desktop applications.

Availability and implementation: Software is freely available online at http://chmille4.github.com/Scribl/ and is implemented in JavaScript with all modern browsers supported.

Contact: gabor.marth@bc.edu

A step towards the “virtual observatory” model of modern astronomy. Free remote access to data in astronomy has long been a fact. It was soon realized that access to data wasn’t enough, remote users needs the power of remote clusters to process large amounts of data.

The intermediate stage of remote access to data and even remote processing models are both going to require easy visualization capabilities.

Are you ready to move to remote access to topic map data?

January 11, 2013

Javascript Plugins To Handle Keyboard Events – 18 Items

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Javascript,JQuery — Patrick Durusau @ 7:33 pm

Javascript Plugins To Handle Keyboard Events – 18 Items by Bogdan Sandu.

From the post:

Users want to see pages really quickly and avoid scrolling a site too much or using the mouse for various events that can be done easier in another way. In order to increase the functionality of a site many web designers use keyboard events so that the users’ experience on the site is better and more enjoyable by navigating easier and seeing more content faster. Of course, this is not the only reason why a web designer would add a jQuery plugin to handle keyboard events on a site, there are other.

Eighteen plugins that can help you with keyboard events in a web interface.

I think the case is fairly compelling for keyboard shortcuts but I type in my sleep. 😉

Your mileage, and that of your users, may vary.

Test with users, deploy and listen to user feedback.

(The opposite of where insiders design, then deploy and user feedback is discarded.)

December 4, 2012

node-webkit

Filed under: CSS3,HTML5,Interface Research/Design,Javascript — Patrick Durusau @ 10:14 am

node-webkit

From the webpage:

node-webkit is an app runtime based on Chromium and node.js. You can write native apps in HTML and Javascript with node-webkit. It also lets you to call Node.js modules directly from DOM and enables a new way of writing native applications with all Web technologies.

Will HTML5 and Javascript, via apps like node-webkit free users from developer based interfaces?

Developer based interfaces are intended to be useful for others, or at least I suspect so, but quite often fall short of the mark.

Apps like node-webkit should encourage rapid prototyping and less reluctance to trash yesterday’s interface code. (I said “should,” whether it will or not remains to be seen.)

Rather than a “full featured” topic map editor, how would you divide the task of authoring a topic map into pieces?

I first saw this in Christophe Lalanne’s A bag of tweets / November 2012.

November 29, 2012

Abusing Cloud-Based Browsers for Fun and Profit [Passing Messages, Not Data]

Filed under: Cloud Computing,Javascript,MapReduce,Messaging — Patrick Durusau @ 12:58 pm

Abusing Cloud-Based Browsers for Fun and Profit by Vasant Tendulkar, Joe Pletcher, Ashwin Shashidharan, Ryan Snyder, Kevin Butler and William Enck.

Abstract:

Cloud services have become a cheap and popular means of computing. They allow users to synchronize data between devices and relieve low-powered devices from heavy computations. In response to the surge of smartphones and mobile devices, several cloud-based Web browsers have become commercially available. These “cloud browsers” assemble and render Web pages within the cloud, executing JavaScript code for the mobile client. This paper explores how the computational abilities of cloud browsers may be exploited through a Browser MapReduce (BMR) architecture for executing large, parallel tasks. We explore the computation and memory limits of four cloud browsers, and demonstrate the viability of BMR by implementing a client based on a reverse engineering of the Puffin cloud browser. We implement and test three canonical MapReduce applications (word count, distributed grep, and distributed sort). While we perform experiments on relatively small amounts of data (100 MB) for ethical considerations, our results strongly suggest that current cloud browsers are a viable source of arbitrary free computing at large scale.

Excellent work on extending the use of cloud-based browsers. Whether you intend to use them for good or ill.

The use of messaging as opposed to passage of data is particularly interesting.

Shouldn’t that work for the process of merging as well?

Comments/suggestions?

November 4, 2012

Saving Tweets

Filed under: Javascript,SQLite,Tweets — Patrick Durusau @ 3:24 pm

No, it not another social cause to save X but rather Pierre Lindenbaum saving his own tweets in: Saving your tweets in a database using sqlite, rhino, scribe, javascript.

Requires sqlite, Apache Rhino, Scribe and Apache codec.

Mapping the saved tweets comes to mind. I am sure you can imagine other uses in a network of topic maps.

October 26, 2012

Google Web Toolkit 2.5 with leaner code

Filed under: Ajax,GWT,Javascript — Patrick Durusau @ 12:55 pm

Google Web Toolkit 2.5 with leaner code

From the post:

According to its developers, version 2.5 of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-based open source web framework for Ajax applications, offers significant performance improvements. Apparently, the overall code base has been reduced by 20 per cent, and the download size of the sample application dropped 39 per cent.

GWT is built around a Java-to-JavaScript compiler that allows developers to almost exclusively use Java when writing an application’s client and server code. The user interface code is translated into JavaScript and deployed to the browser when required. The technology recently became a discussion topic when Google introduced its Dart alternative to JavaScript; however, Google has assured the GWT community that it will continue to develop GWT for the foreseeable future.

Ready to improve your delivery of content?

October 23, 2012

Basics of JavaScript and D3 for R Users

Filed under: D3,Javascript,R — Patrick Durusau @ 10:58 am

Basics of JavaScript and D3 for R Users by Jerzy Wieczorek.

From the post:

Hadley Wickham, creator of the ggplot2 R package, has been learning JavaScript and its D3 library for the next iteration of ggplot2 (tentatively titled r2d3?)… so I suspect it’s only a matter of time before he pulls the rest of the R community along.

Below are a few things that weren’t obvious when I first tried reading JavaScript code and the D3 library in particular. (Please comment if you notice any errors.) Then there’s also a quick walkthrough for getting D3 examples running locally on your computer, and finally a list of other tutorials & resources. In a future post, we’ll explore one of the D3 examples and practice tweaking it.

Perhaps these short notes will help other R users get started more quickly than I did. Even if you’re a ways away from writing complex JavaScript from scratch, it can still be useful to take one of the plentiful D3 examples and modify it for your own purposes.

Just in case you don’t have time today to build clusters on EC2. 😉

Being mindful that delivery of content is what leads to sales.

Or, knowing isn’t the same as showing.

The first may make you feel important. The second may lead to sales.

Up to you.

September 16, 2012

Machine Learning: Genetic Algorithms Part 1 (Javascript)

Filed under: Genetic Algorithms,Javascript,Machine Learning — Patrick Durusau @ 12:37 pm

Machine Learning: Genetic Algorithms Part 1 (Javascript) by Burak Kanber.

From the post:

I like starting my machine learning classes with genetic algorithms (which we’ll abbreviate “GA” sometimes). Genetic algorithms are probably the least practical of the ML algorithms I cover, but I love starting with them because they’re fascinating and they do a good job of introducing the “cost function” or “error function”, and the idea of local and global optima — concepts both important and common to most other ML algorithms.

Genetic algorithms are inspired by nature and evolution, which is seriously cool to me. It’s no surprise, either, that artificial neural networks (“NN”) are also modeled from biology: evolution is the best general-purpose learning algorithm we’ve experienced, and the brain is the best general-purpose problem solver we know. These are two very important pieces of our biological existence, and also two rapidly growing fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning study. While I’m tempted to talk more about the distinction I make between the GA’s “learning algorithm” and the NN’s “problem solver” terminology, we’ll drop the topic of NNs altogether and concentrate on GAs… for now.

One phrase I used above is profoundly important: “general-purpose”. For almost any specific computational problem, you can probably find an algorithm that solves it more efficiently than a GA. But that’s not the point of this exercise, and it’s also not the point of GAs. You use the GA not when you have a complex problem, but when you have a complex problem of problems. Or you may use it when you have a complicated set of disparate parameters.

Off to a great start!

September 5, 2012

Machine Learning in All Languages: Introduction

Filed under: Javascript,Machine Learning,Perl,PHP,Ruby — Patrick Durusau @ 4:20 pm

Machine Learning in All Languages: Introduction by Burak Kanber.

From the post:

I love machine learning algorithms. I’ve taught classes and seminars and given talks on ML. The subject is fascinating to me, but like all skills fascination simply isn’t enough. To get good at something, you need to practice!

I also happen to be a PHP and Javascript developer. I’ve taught classes on both of these as well — but like any decent software engineer I have experience with Ruby, Python, Perl, and C. I just prefer PHP and JS. Before you flame PHP, I’ll just say that while it has its problems, I like it because it gets stuff done.

Whenever I say that Tidal Labs’ ML algorithms are in PHP, they look at me funny and ask me how it’s possible. Simple: it’s possible to write ML algorithms in just about any language. Most people just don’t care the learn the fundamentals strongly enough that they can write an algorithm from scratch. Instead, they rely on Python libraries to do the work for them, and end up not truly grasping what’s happening inside the black box.

Through this series of articles, I’ll teach you the fundamental machine learning algorithms in a variety of languages, including:

  • PHP
  • Javascript
  • Perl
  • C
  • Ruby

Just started so too soon to comment but thought it might be of interest.

September 3, 2012

Hakim [Graphics, Visualizations]

Filed under: CSS3,Graphics,Javascript,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 1:58 pm

Hakim by Hakim El Hattab.

I was following a link to Reveal.js HTML Presentations Made Easy when I discovered its “parent” site.

A likely source of ideas for visualization for your data sets.

I first saw this at DZone.

August 30, 2012

Recline.js

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Javascript,Web Applications — Patrick Durusau @ 9:41 am

Recline.js

From the documentation:

The Recline Library consists of 3 parts: Models, Backends and Views

Models

Models help you structure your work with data by providing some standard objects such as Dataset and Record – a Dataset being a collection of Records. More »

Backends

Backends connect your Models to data sources (and stores) – for example Google Docs spreadsheets, local CSV files, the DataHub, ElasticSearch etc. More »

Views

Views are user interface components for displaying, editing or interacting with the data. For example, maps, graphs, data grids or a query editor. More »

Make trial-n-error with interfaces easy, while you search for the one that users “like” in < 50 milliseconds. What if you had to hard code every interface change? How quickly would the rule become: Users must adapt to the interface? Not a bad rule, if you want to drive customers to other sites/vendors. (Think about that for a minute, then take Recline.js for a spin.)

August 26, 2012

HTML5, Apps and JavaScript Video

Filed under: HTML5,Javascript — Patrick Durusau @ 3:34 pm

HTML5, Apps and JavaScript Video by Brad Stenger.

From the post:

Here are the videos from last week’s TimesOpen event on HTML5, Apps and JavaScript:

If you missed the TimesOpen event on August 15th on HTML5, Apps and JavaScript, videos have been posted!

In case you are curious about good days to be in New York City in the near future, check out:

Times Open. (There’s some other reason to go to New York?)

August 6, 2012

Channel 9’s JavaScript Fundamentals Series

Filed under: Javascript — Patrick Durusau @ 3:57 pm

Channel 9’a JavaScript Fundamental Series

I hesitated before making this post.

In part because of concern for how it would “look” to post on deeply theoretical language issues and JavaScript on the same day, in the same week, or even on the same blog.

Then I remembered that the point of this blog is to convey useful information users, authors and designers of topic maps and systems to deal with semantic diversity. How any particular post “looks” to anyone, isn’t relevant to that purpose.

If a post is too simple for you, look the other way. 😉

As much a comment to myself as anyone else!

Enjoy!

August 2, 2012

How to Make an Interactive Network Visualization

Filed under: D3,Graphics,Graphs,Javascript,Music,Networks,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 10:10 am

How to Make an Interactive Network Visualization by Jim Vallandingham.

From the post:

Interactive network visualizations make it easy to rearrange, filter, and explore your connected data. Learn how to make one using D3 and JavaScript.

Networks! They are all around us. The universe is filled with systems and structures that can be organized as networks. Recently, we have seen them used to convict criminals, visualize friendships, and even to describe cereal ingredient combinations. We can understand their power to describe our complex world from Manuel Lima’s wonderful talk on organized complexity. Now let’s learn how to create our own.

In this tutorial, we will focus on creating an interactive network visualization that will allow us to get details about the nodes in the network, rearrange the network into different layouts, and sort, filter, and search through our data.

In this example, each node is a song. The nodes are sized based on popularity, and colored by artist. Links indicate two songs are similar to one another.

Try out the visualization on different songs to see how the different layouts and filters look with the different graphs.

You know this isn’t a post about politics because it would be visualizing friendships with convicted criminals. 😉

A degree of separation graph between elected public officials and convicted white collar criminals? A topic map for another day.

For today, enjoy learning how to use D3 and JavaScript for impressive network visualizations.

Imagine mapping the cereal visualization to the shelf locations at your local Kroger, where selecting one ingredient identifies the store locations of others.

June 9, 2012

Hadoop Streaming Support for MongoDB

Filed under: Hadoop,Javascript,MapReduce,MongoDB,Python,Ruby — Patrick Durusau @ 7:13 pm

Hadoop Streaming Support for MongoDB

From the post:

MongoDB has some native data processing tools, such as the built-in Javascript-oriented MapReduce framework, and a new Aggregation Framework in MongoDB v2.2. That said, there will always be a need to decouple persistance and computational layers when working with Big Data.

Enter MongoDB+Hadoop: an adapter that allows Apache’s Hadoop platform to integrate with MongoDB.

[graphic omitted]

Using this adapter, it is possible to use MongoDB as a real-time datastore for your application while shifting large aggregation, batch processing, and ETL workloads to a platform better suited for the task.

[graphic omitted]

Well, the engineers at 10gen have taken it one step further with the introduction of the streaming assembly for Mongo-Hadoop.

What does all that mean?

The streaming assembly lets you write MapReduce jobs in languages like Python, Ruby, and JavaScript instead of Java, making it easy for developers that are familiar with MongoDB and popular dynamic programing languages to leverage the power of Hadoop.

I like that, “…popular dynamic programming languages…” 😉

Any improvement to increase usability without religious conversion (using a programming language not your favorite) is a good move.

March 16, 2012

Using the DataJS Library for Data-Centric JavaScript Web Applications

Filed under: DataJS,Javascript,Odata — Patrick Durusau @ 7:35 pm

Using the DataJS Library for Data-Centric JavaScript Web Applications.

Brian Rinaldi writes:

I recently attended the HTML5 Summit in Miami Beach where one of the speakers was David Zhang of Microsoft speaking about the DataJS library created by Microsoft for building data-centric web applications. The DataJS library can make it easy to integrate services into your application and add features like pre-fetching, paging and caching in local storage, including support for IndexedDB. The project sounded interesting so I made a note to try it out and finally got around to it. Here’s an overview.

From the DataJS project page:

datajs is a new cross-browser JavaScript library that enables data-centric web applications by leveraging modern protocols such as JSON and OData and HTML5-enabled browser features. It’s designed to be small, fast and easy to use.

Are you delivering your next topic map to a web browser or a standalone app?

March 7, 2012

JavaScript Console and Excel Coming to Hadoop

Filed under: Excel,Hadoop,Javascript — Patrick Durusau @ 5:42 pm

JavaScript Console and Excel Coming to Hadoop

Alex Popescu (myNoSQL) has pointers to news of Hadoop on Windows Azure. Opens Hadoop up to Javascript developers and Excel/PowerPivot users.

Alex captures the winning strategy for new technologies when he says:

Think of integration with familiar tools and frameworks as a huge adoption accelerator.

What would it look like to add configurable merging on PowerPivot? (I may have to get a copy of MS Office 2010.)

January 14, 2012

Custom Search JavaScript API is now fully documented!

Filed under: Google CSE,Javascript,Search Engines,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 7:33 pm

Custom Search JavaScript API is now fully documented!

Riona MacNamara writes:

The Custom Search engineers spent 2011 launching great features. But we still hear from our users that our documentation could do with improvement. We hear you. Today we’re launching some updates to our docs:

  • Comprehensive JavaScript reference for the Custom Search Element. We’ve completely overhauled our Custom Search Element API documentation to provide a comprehensive overview of all the JavaScript methods available. We can’t wait to see what you build with it.
  • More languages. The Help Center is now available in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.
  • Easier navigation and cleaner design. We’ve reorganized the Help Center to make it easier to find the information you’re looking for. Navigation is simpler and more streamlined. Individual articles have been revised and updated, and designed to be more readable.

Documentation is an ongoing effort, and we’ll be continuing to improve both our Help Center and our developer documentation. If you have comments or suggestions, we’d love to see them in our user forum.

Granting that a Google CSE could give you more focused results (along with ads), but don’t you still have the problem of re-using search results?

It’s a good thing that users can more quickly find relevant content in a particular domain, but do you really want your users searching for the same information over and over again?

Hmmm, what if you kept a search log with the “successful” results as chosen by your users? That could be a start in terms of locating subjects and information about them that is important to your users. Subjects that could then be entered into your topic map.

December 29, 2011

Top 50 JavaScript, jQuery Plugins and Tutorials From 2011

Filed under: Javascript,JQuery — Patrick Durusau @ 9:17 pm

Top 50 JavaScript, jQuery Plugins and Tutorials From 2011

From the post:

jQuery is amazing as you can find plugins to accomplish almost anything you want. It makes your work easy and quick. And Javascript has always been a favorite of people. we have a list of top jQuery, Javascript plugins and tutorials that will help you a lot and will definitely make your life easier.

I hope you would find these apps useful. It includes apps that will let you create loading animation, which help make your website responsive to user interaction as they would know that the server is processing their request. Then we have apps that will help you optimize your website for mobile phones. We also have some awesome Javascript color picker plugins and JavaScript Games too. Not only that, we have some really cool Javascript Experiments and jQuery tutorials for you, which would help you learn tricks that you might not have known before. So what are you waiting for?! Check them out!

You will have to let me know about the optimizing the web interface for a topic map on a cell phone. Some of the others? I will try to report back to you. 😉

December 21, 2011

Three New Splunk Developer Platform Offerings

Filed under: Java,Javascript,Python,Splunk — Patrick Durusau @ 7:24 pm

Three New Splunk Developer Platform Offerings

From the post:

Last week was a busy week for the Splunk developer platform team. We pushed live 2 SDKs within one hour! We are excited to announce the release of:

  • Java SDK Preview on GitHub. The Java SDK enables our growing base of customers to share and harness the core Splunk platform and the valuable data stored in Splunk across the enterprise. The SDK ships with a number of examples including an explorer utility that provides the ability to explore the components and configuration settings of a Splunk installation. Learn more about the Java SDK.
  • JavaScript SDK Preview on GitHub The JavaScript SDK takes big data to the web by providing developers with the ability to easily integrate visualizations into custom applications. Now developers can take the timeline view and charting capabilities of Splunk’s out-of-the-box web interface and include them in their custom applications. Additionally, with node.js support on the server side, developers can build end-to-end applications completely in JavaScript. Learn more about the JavaScript SDK.
  • Splunk Developer AMI. A developer-focused publicly available Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that includes all the Splunk SDKs and Splunk 4.2.5. The Splunk Developer AMI, will make it easier for developers to try the Splunk platform. To enhance the usability of the image, developers can sign up for a free developer license trial, which can be used with the AMI. Read our blog post to learn more about the developer AMI.

The delivery of the Java and JavaScript SDKs coupled with our existing Python SDK (GitHub) reinforce our commitment to developer enablement by providing more language choice for application development and putting the SDKs on the Splunk Linux AMI expedites the getting started experience.

We are seeing tremendous interest in our developer community and customer base for Splunk to play a central role facilitating the ability to build innovative applications on top of a variety of data stores that span on-premises, cloud and mobile.

We are enabling developers to build complex Big Data applications for a variety of scenarios including:

  • Custom built visualizations
  • Reporting tool integrations
  • Big Data and relational database integrations
  • Complex event processing

Not to mention being just in time for the holidays! 😉

Seriously, tools to do useful work with “big data” are coming online. The question is going to be the skill with which they are applied.

December 10, 2011

Wakanda js.everywhere()

Filed under: Javascript,Wakanda — Patrick Durusau @ 8:02 pm

Wakanda js.everywhere() by Alexandre Morgaut.

Really do wish I had seen this one.

Guess what well known representation appears on slide 6?

😉

It is a worthy, if unattainable goal.

Still, enjoy the slides and Wakanda.

December 1, 2011

Node.js Tutorial

Filed under: Javascript,node-js — Patrick Durusau @ 7:41 pm

Node.js Tutorial by Alex Young.

A tutorial on building a notepad web app called NodePad using node.js.

I happened upon lesson #23, which makes it hard to get your bearings but the Alex included the link you see above, which gives you an ordered listing of the lessons.

I haven’t gone back to the beginning but judging from the comments it would not be a bad thing to do!

November 29, 2011

Wakanda

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Javascript — Patrick Durusau @ 9:12 pm

Wakanda

From the documentation page:

Wakanda is an open-source platform that allows you to develop business web applications. It provides a unified stack running on JavaScript from end-to-end:

  • Cross-platform and cloud-ready on the back end
  • Fully functional, go-anywhere desktop, mobile and tablet apps on the front end

You gain the ability to create browser-based data applications that are as fast, stable, and capable as native client/server solutions are on the desktop.

and:

Notice that no code is generated behind your back: no SQL statements, no binaries, …
What you write is what you get.

I’m not sure that’s a good thing but the name ran a bell and I found an earlier post, Berlin Buzzwords 2011, that just has a slide deck on it.

It’s in Developer Preview 2 (is that pre-pre-alpha or some other designation?) now.

Comments? Anyone looking at this for interface type issues?

I’m the first to admit that most interfaces disappoint but that isn’t because of the underlying technology. Most interfaces disappoint because they are designed as a matter of the underlying technology.

A well-designed green screen would find faster acceptance than any number of current interfaces. (Note I said a well-designed green screen.)

October 29, 2011

Testling – Automated Cross-Browser Javascript Testing

Filed under: Javascript — Patrick Durusau @ 7:22 pm

Testling – Automated Cross-Browser Javascript Testing

I ran across this service while looking at data blogs. Looked like it would be a useful resource for topic map developers working on web interfaces.

I am sure others of this type exist, suggestions/pointers?

Check out the other items on the site. The sed and awk “cheat” sheets are two items that may be of interest.

September 27, 2011

The Node Beginner Book

Filed under: Javascript,node-js — Patrick Durusau @ 6:46 pm

The Node Beginner Book by Manuel Kiessling.

I ran across this the other day when I was posting Node.js at Scale and just forgot to post it.

Nice introduction to Node.js.

You may also be interested in:

How to Node

Node.js

There are lots of other resources but that should be enough to get you started.

BTW, would “lite” servers with Node.js answer the question of who gets what data we saw in: Linked Data Semantic Issues (same for topic maps?)? Some people might get very little “extra” information if any at all. Others could get quite a bit extra. Would not have to build a monolithic server with every capability.

September 26, 2011

Node.js at Scale

Filed under: Javascript,node-js — Patrick Durusau @ 7:01 pm

Node.js at Scale by Tom Hughes-Croucher (Joyent).

ABSTRACT

When we talk about performance what do we mean? There are many metrics that matter in different scenarios but it’s difficult to measure them all. Tom Hughes-Croucher looks at what performance is achievable with Node today, which metrics matter and how to pick the ones that most matter to you. Most importantly he looks at why metrics don’t matter as much as you think and the critical decision making involved in picking a programming language, a framework, or even just the way you write code.

BIOGRAPHY

Tom Hughes-Croucher is the Chief Evangelist at Joyent, sponsors of the Node.js project. Tom mostly spends his days helping companies build really exciting projects with Node and seeing just how far it will scale. Tom is also the author of the O’Reilly book “Up and running with Node.js”. Tom has worked for many well known organizations including Yahoo, NASA and Tesco.

I thought the discussion of metrics was going to be the best part. It is worth your time but I stayed around for the node.js demonstration and it was impressive!

September 23, 2011

Top JavaScript Dynamic Table Libraries

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Javascript — Patrick Durusau @ 6:26 pm

Top JavaScript Dynamic Table Libraries from Sematext.

From the post:

Since @sematext focuses on Search, Data and Text Analytics, and similar areas that typically involve exclusively backend, server-side work, we rarely publish anything that deals with UI, UX, with JavaScript, front ends, and do on. However, our Search Analytics and Scalable Performance Monitoring services/products do have rich, data-driven UIs (think reports, graphs, charts, tables), so we are increasingly thinking (obsessing?) about usability, intuitive and clean interfaces, visual data representations, etc. (in fact, we have an opening for a UI/UX designer and developer). Recently, we decided to upgrade a group of Search Analytics reports that, until now, used a quickly-thrown-together HTML table that, as much as we loved its simplicity, needed a replacement. So we set out to look for something better, more functional and elegant. In the process we identified a number of JavaScript libraries for rendering and browsing tabular data. Eventually we narrowed our selection to 6 JavaScript libraries whose characteristics we analyzed. In the spirit of sharing and helping others, please find their feature matrix below.

I suppose there is a time in everyone’s life when they finally have to show their front end. This will help you with yours. 😉

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