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Idubee 2 -it’s all about performance and reliability

Finally I’ve demoed new version of Idubee Flex spreadsheet application to Singapore Flex User Group (which happened to be at local Adobe office). New version of Idubee has been developed without any use of previous codebase. Cairngorm was used with some insertion of custom made Dependency Injection framework, backend was reimplemented with Spring/Hibernate/GraniteDS on Jetty instead of EJB3/GraniteDS on JBoss (mainly because of the server downgrade that I had to do).

New spreadsheet component allows virtually unlimited number of rows and columns (i’ve tested it with millions of data cells in the spreadsheet), supports multiple sheets, customizable  hot-keys,  per-character formatting, pseudo-multithreading  for formula calculations etc. The goal was to make this release reusable, performant and reliable (especially for calculations).
It’s not yet rolled out yet but if someone is interested, just drop me a line: andriyo at gmail.com

The Early Days

Idubee got its name from the Zulu word “idube” which means Zebra. A zebra ‘s stripes reminds us of the grid and the animal is unique, like our spreadsheet.

So what is Idubee in a nutshell? Idubee is an online spreadsheet application similar to Open Office Calc and MS Office Excel but is available online.

Idubee’s has several features that make it different from other offline/online spreadsheet applications:

• It is built on Adobe Flex technology, not JavaScript. Adobe Flex provides a desktop like experience in all browsers where Flash Player 9 is supported.
• Support for big files with complex formulas and lots of data (4^32 rows and columns)
• Extensible by users (embedded scripting language) and other developers thru plug-in infrastructure.
• Offline support (in Flex and Adobe AIR versions)
• Collaboration (thru distributed version control system)

 

The Idubee spreadsheet application is mainly a personal R&D project. We do not intend on taking the application commercial. The goals of the project are:

1. To develop an enterprise application with a sophisticated user interface to prove that Flex RIA could be used in the domain of enterprise applications (not only form-based CRUD applications)

1. Implement all features expected from industry leading desktop spreadsheet applications

1. Develop general implementation for offline/online synchronization and distributed document version control system.

1. Leverage development strategies using cloud computation and storage thru Amazon Web Services.

1. Implement multithreading (for example background formula computations) in Adobe Flash environment (which is known to be single threaded)

1. Implement architecture with thick client and thin server to leverage power of modern desktops.

1. Implement script language engine in ActionScript3 for dynamic extensibility of the product.

1. Implement features that are vital for financial applications (big numbers with high precision, math error handling etc).

1. Develop API for external users to use Idubee as viewer or editor of users personal spreadsheet files.

The spreadsheet application were chosen for this project as these require solid mathematical background, real value for end users and lack of robust online spreadsheet applications up to the moment. The current project is in alpha stage, but is already usable with following features implemented: online spreadsheet editing, selection, formatting, formulas, search/replace, sorting, autofill, tagging, MS Office files import/export etc.

Please take a look at our screencast (and old ones here and here) or register to experience the current version of Idubee spreadsheet application.