I’ve been searching for a good Excel-like grid widget that can be embedded in web-apps. I essentially need something like Google Docs but open so I can alter and self host it.

Here is my wishlist:

• Looks nice
• Allows inline cell editing
• good Javascript API or extensibility
• can plop into an existing project without committing to a whole framework (sorry RichFaces)
• Supports as many functions as possible, Excel functions would be nice
• Open source (LGPL or something similar)

I looked at a ton of projects. These grids looked great for displaying data but didn’t have any support for functions so they were out. I’m putting the list here to remind myself to keep them in mind for other projects.

• dhtmlXGrid
• JQuery Grid
• FlexiGrid
• YUI Datatable

In the end it came down to these three projects:

• Sigma Grid
• Simple Spreadsheet
• Socialcalc

Sigma Grid:

This is a nice grid for structured data and supports pretty much everything I would need for most projects. It even has chart, print, and calendar support which would make it great for end users. It supports formulas but only ones defined in the code on the page, not ones the user enters, so it wouldn’t work for this particular project.

Simple Spreadsheet

This spreadsheet appears to be the most capable Excel like clone I could find. It supports charts, formulas, and custom macros. I ended up not using this because the GUI is lacking. Out of the box my users would be forced to know some html. There also seemed to be some weird behavior when you are editing a cell with a formula in it and click on another cell. I think this would be a great project if it got a makeover and a nice user-friendly toolbar. Try it out Here.

Social Calc

I don’t remember how I found this project because their website is the least flashy and really doesn’t show much about the grid at all. Social Calc could also use some help on the GUI front, and I will have to clean it up a little before I put it in my project – but it seems to be a solid reliable control. Once you get past the UI differences from Excel — you can’t right click or select rows or columns — the editing is pretty smooth and natural. For client side formulas I would have been happy with =SUM() and =AVG() functions and was pleased to find =VLOOKUP() and most others working. In fact, it seems to support most Excel functions with the exact syntax that business guys love.
It doesn’t seem to be able to do nested formula calls. I am going to look into how difficult it would be to add that if I end up using it.

I couldn’t find a demo of Social Calc anywhere on their site. I put their demo up here if you want to try it out.

Sloppy is a tool I use all the time to test out sites in. It will load any site and simulate a slower connection than you are currently using. It used to be great to see how your site loaded on a 56k modem — now I use it to test how my sites load on a cell phone connection.

It also works cross platform without any install thanks to Java Web Start.

One of the tricky things about having flash or ajax client applications that request data on their own is knowing what they are requesting and when. I went nuts today trying to figure out if my ajax was making the right calls and getting back data, 404 messages, or nothing at all. That was until i remembered Squid.

Squid is a simple proxy server used in the unix world for logging or filtering web content but it can be very handy as a desktop tool for debugging rich internet applications.

Looking around, I found this great installer and GUI front end for Squid for OSX called SquidMan.

When you first launch SquidMan it will prompt you to install the Squid subsystem, just click OK enter your password and it will bring up the settings:

You can leave all of the settings as the default

Then from the main dialog, click “Start Squid”

In firefox, find the network settings under the Advanced tab:

Enter your local computer 127.0.0.1 as the proxy host:

This will now force all of your Firefox traffic to go through the squid proxy. From the main SquidMan application settings, you can now choose “Tools” and see a log of every URL that is requested by javascript or flash within your browser:

OpenCV is rapidly changing and there is no bundled version that comes with OSX. I’m working on some command line apps and don’t feel like explaining to my users how to install Macports so I decided I would need to statically compile it into my application. There is a OSX Framework available, but I’m not making an application bundle so that was a no-go.

Here is what needed to be done:

First off, this document on the OpenCv Wiki doesn’t seem to work anymore if you are pulling directly from subversion.

Build System – Open CV seems to have 3 types of build scripts in subversion: Make, Autotools, and CMake. It took a lot of trial and error before I realized that only CMake appears to be working, at least on my system.

You can get a copy of CMake here here.

Before you run CMake, you have to change the following files:

• src/cxcore/CMakeLists.txt
• src/highgui/CMakeLists.txt
• src/cvaux/CMakeLists.txt
• src/cv/CMakeLists.txt
• src/ml/CMakeLists.txt
• tests/cxts/CMakeLists.txt

Look for the add_library lines and change this:

add_library(${the_target} DYNAMIC ${lib_srcs} ${lib_hdrs})

to this:

add_library(${the_target} STATIC ${lib_srcs} ${lib_hdrs})

Once you have made that change, follow the CMake instructions here

In Your Own Project
Assuming the above worked well, you can now statically compile your application pointing to the .a files generated by your opencv build.

One thing to keep in mind, is that your application now has to be linked to OSX system frameworks. You can resolve this by adding the frameworks to your linker in your Makefile:

-framework Carbon -framework CoreFoundation -framework QuickTime -framework QuartzCore