Peter Brantley wrote in email: “not sure if you have seen this, but it is in the really cool department – an ajax timeline on historical data that uses an xml file as input. a friend at MIT, mackenzie smith, alerted me to it. it is part of MIT’s simile project, and evidently one of their grad students [David Huynh] cooked it up.”
Peter’s right. It is indeed cool, and it looks very easy to use too. What’s more, it now supports JSON as well as XML files as a data source.
This whole movement of re-usable AJAX widgets is really taking off. We’re getting a richer and richer set, beyond the “usual suspects.” Google has made a commitment to offer AJAX widgets for all their search services, and other sites are doing the same. But what I especially like about timeline is that it’s not featuring anyone’s services — it’s just a generalized data visualization widget.
Let us know about other cool AJAX widgets you’ve come across (whether as skins for existing web services, or standalone.)