A week ago we reviewed a very cool application, DabbleDB (review here). They are still in private beta at the moment but there have been a lot of requests from people wishing to use the service. While we weren’t able to convince the guys to let the flood of people in, but we were able to grab a screencast demo of their application. The demo video demonstrates what I saw while using the application, it is just this easy to use and this functional.
In just a few minutes, the video will show how you can start with simple, flat spreadsheet data, use Dabble DB to search and explore this data right away, then gradually evolve into a full conference-planning application (with drop-down lists, calendar views, relations, and more). While this demo shows that full app development can take place in only a few minutes, in practice it would usually happen organically over a period of time as the app editors further expand their apps.
DabbleDB Demo Video (7 minutes)
I love this application. Thank you for pointing to the demo.
Does Mike Arrington still own this site???
Amazing. After reading the review i wasn’t entirely convinced about dabble (especially with the screenshots that were posted) but i can now say after watching the screencast that this is going to be a killer application. Nice work Andrew and Avi.
Alas, you are writing shorter articles!
Isn’t that just Lotus Notes circa 1995? With web features which Lotus added in 1997.
MonsterMan it is taking corporations years to get *out* of Notes, I don’t think anybody wants to go back *in*
I’m with John on this one. Screenshots really don’t do this app justice. The capability of this app is just incredible.
No argument there Nik. All I’m saying is that this app doesn’t look too revolutionary to me. Judging by that demo, it’s just Notes with less features at about the same level as Lotus was 11 years ago.
Definitely cool, too bad I have absolutely no use for it.
was not able to get the video running with my firfox+linux machine. DBdabble, u listening?
tester:
We are indeed listening.. is there a particular codec you’d like? Also, have you tried mplayer by any chance? It might work for you.
* Jim, Jennifer, John, Dave:
Thanks for the kind words. We’ve certainly found that we get the best reactions with videos (and of course live demos). I think this may largely be because much of our effort has gone into making Dabble as direct-manipulation-based as possible, something which you really need to see in action.
* MonsterMan:
I’m never sure how to respond to comments like this. Obviously, at a high enough level of abstraction, Dabble DB is like Notes (or Access, or Excel, or..) in that its goal is to help people manage data, and to try to be as inclusive as possible about who can use it. The way we differentiate ourselves is in the execution — a cursory look would show that Dabble does things differently than all of these other tools, just as they do things differently from one another. So, it really comes down to the details, and how those details combine to enable the wide variety of possible users out there.
Whether Dabble ends up being revolutionary or evolutionary or neither remains to be seen — I would measure this by our ability to bring database power to people for whom it’s so far been inaccessible. All I can say for now is that, from the limited amount of feedback we’ve been able to gather so far, I’m hopeful that we have some useful to contribute here.
Thanks everyone for your comments.
Very impressive – I like a lot of the refinements to the details in the development experience and the potential for widening the audience as you say. Many elements of this remind me a lot of Oracle’s Application Express Tool. Have you seen that?
http://www.orac...ress/index.html
Would be interesting to compare the two (even if Oracle is a behemoth).
Best of luck,
Bill
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Anyone know if this will allow images to be added? And be able to see thumbnails?
All cheap knock-offs of MS Sharepoint.
Johnny R: No support for image fields yet, but that’ll be added soon.
Bill, I think Application Express is, in practice if not in intent, targetting a different class of users than we are: it feels like you’d have to be fairly familiar with relational databases in general and Oracle in particular to be very comfortable using it. Here, for example, is a step from their introductory tutorial (http://www.orac.../htmldb_otn.htm):
“You need to link the PROJECTS Master Page with this page. In the Parent Page to This Page Column Associations section, select PROJECT for the Link Column, select PROJECT_ID for the parent report column – column 1, select PROJECT_ID for the link to this report column – report column. Deselect the Use theme-specific edit button check box. The variable #PROJECT# should appear in the Link Text field. Click Apply Changes.”
If we ever add a feature to Dabble that needs documentation like that, somebody slap me.
Please please please please please let me have an invite!
Now that I have that out of the way…
1. How will this integrate with web services. I have seen on other blogs that it will support (one day) the ATOM API for other clients wanting to read and write data to a DabbleDB app. But will a DabbleDB app be able to access other web services via ATOM/SOAP/REST, etc? I appreciate that such integration might be hard to make ’simple’ enough to stay within DabbleDB’s goals, but it would be great functionality to have.
2. Will there be some sort of charting capability added?
James:
Invite: email me.
Web services: yes, I think so.
Charts: eventually.
Avi
This is pretty much one will get for free with SQL Server Yukon.
It will be possible to wrap a commercial service like DabbleDB around SQL Server and offer this as a service.
User will not need any db skills.
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hi
Hey dabble is good but i am not impressed at all, it works around spread sheets……and i dont like it because when i am building an application i dont want any constraint on me and as you see dabble does put around a constraint right at the beginning by taking the spread sheet aproach.Check out our tool called “zeroCode”.It is t’s all Java and XML behind the scenes, the Design Environment is completely browser based. And, best of all, you do all this in a browser – no applets, no AJAX in the construction process.
Check the tool out guys —> http://www.zerocode.com
Let me know your comments