Turning the table on display

A table is one of the most common data display methods. Whether you are trying to show products and their attributes, customers and their demographics, or weather information, tables are one of the best ways to show and analyze data.

You want to be able to have features like sorting and filtering to really make your data come alive. The trouble is that tables created with HTML are static. Sure, you can snazzy them up with DHTML but really effective, highly functional tables require serious programming.

This means that on the Web, a Java applet is a natural for creating a sophisticated table and I’ve just found a killer! It’s called (rather dully) Table from ObjectPlanet AS (see editorial links below).

The Table applet allows you to display, sort, search and filter data directly from the applet’s parameters (handy when you want to integrate with server side scripting using, for example, ASP). Here’s what calling the applet with data in the parameters looks like:

 archive=com.objectplanet.gui.Table.jar

 width=200 height=100>

And here’s what it looks like through a parameter that gives the URL of the data:

 archive=com.objectplanet.gui.Table.jar

 width=200 height=100>

The Table applet is only 35K bytes ensuring fast loads even for slow connections.

The applet has dozens of other parameters including control of header and footer rows size (these can also be changed by the user with the mouse), cell and text colors, sort order and data format for numbers and dates. You can also define tooltip help for each column header cell. Check out the example embedded in the User Guide.

Pricing is $199 for the Table binary development kit (includes one year of support and upgrades) and $399 for the Table source development kit (also with one year of support and upgrades).