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Author Topic: Exhibit: Display adjustable data tables on web page without server software  (Read 4111 times)

mouser

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This is an open source tool that lets you take your spreadsheet or data files and create a web page built only using javascript, that supports interactive manipulation/sorting/filtering by viewers.

It's designed for small scale stuff, but this could be very useful for some things, like if you want to display a small table of data to your reader and want them to be able to explore the data a little.

There's a video presentation showing how it could be used for teaching here: http://bionicteachin...exhibit/Exhibit.html
They also have a wiki -- fun stuff.

Exhibit is a lightweight structured data publishing framework that lets you create web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and rich visualizations by writing only HTML and optionally some CSS and Javascript code.

It's like Google Maps and Timeline, but for structured data normally published through database-backed web sites. Exhibit essentially removes the need for a database or a server side web application. Its Javascript-based engine makes it easy for everyone who has a little bit of knowledge of HTML and small data sets to share them with the world and let people easily interact with them.
...
Exhibit consists of a bunch of Javascript files that you include in your web page. At load time, this Javascript code reads in one or more JSON data files that you link from within your web page and constructs a database implemented in Javascript right inside the browser of whoever visits your web page. It then dynamically re-constructs the web page as the visitor sorts and filters through the data. As the visitor interacts with the web page, only the web browser is responsible for providing the interaction; the web server is no longer needed.
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We also provide a complementary service called Babel that lets you convert data from various sources, including tab-separated values (copied straight from spreadsheets) and Bibtex files, into formats that Exhibit understands.

Important fine print, emphasis mine:
Exhibit currently only scales to a few hundreds of items, but maybe that's all you need. Furthermore, we are working on optimizing Exhibit and on ways for you to smoothly transit over to server-side solutions as your data sets grow.


from http://www.nedbatchelder.com