Curl Version 7 Sample Application: Timeline Viewer

[ashimo]

This simple viewer for historical timeline data illustrates how applications built on the Curl platform can load substantial data sets and provide a rich, interactive user interface for exploring them.

This application was inspired by a browser-based, AJAX timeline viewer built by the SIMILE project at MIT. This Curl viewer is driven by the same XML timeline files that were created in association with that project.

The URL for installing the timeline viewer directly from the Curl Developer Center is

curl://offline/curl://launch/http://developers.curl.com/demos/nitro/timeline/start.dcurl
Limitations in the infrastructure of this Web site prevent making the above link directly clickable, but if you paste the above URL into the address field of your browser, you can install the timeline viewer on your system. You will need to have the Curl Version 7 RTE installed on your machine first. (If you are running Firefox, you may see a popup window asking whether to run the Curl RTE File Loader. After you authorize this operation, the installation window for the timeline viewer will be displayed.)

Once you have the application installed and running, you can click the Help button to read the operating instructions.

The Curl capabilities demonstrated by this program are useful in many interactive data visualization applications. In business and science, there are many instances of time-based data including server logs and transaction histories. Many data sets are provided as XML files similar to the timeline files used by this viewer. The clickable links that are included in the viewer's pop-up information windows illustrate how Curl can be used not only to display a data set, but to present that data set in a way that serves as a starting point for exploring other, related resources and information. Finally, the application can run offline as well as online.

If you want to see how this timeline viewer works, please download the attached zip file, which contains all the source files used to build the application. You can modify these source files to create your own variations of this viewer.

timeline.zip