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Embedded Pivot Tables for Java Web Apps

Potix Corporation, the creator and chief commercial supporter of the open source ZK framework, this week released ZK Pivottable 1.0, an Ajax summarization component for visualizing data sets as spreadsheets. The company is billing the new product line as one of the "first true pivot tables" that can be embedded in Java Web applications.

The new ZK Pivottable is aimed squarely at the business user who needs an easy-to-use tool for taking raw data from a flat table (relational DB) and organizing those data by categories in columns and rows "dynamically and automatically" without having to enter a formula. Features include flexible presentation controls, a filtering utility and more.

Hosted on SourceForge, ZK is an open-source Ajax Web app framework written in Java. It's designed to allow developers to create rich UIs with no actual JavaScript (the "J" in Ajax.) ZK supports a markup language for rich user interface definition called ZUML, which is aimed at non-programmer developers.

Since it was first released in 2005, ZK has had more than a million downloads, the ZK community reports. The ZK framework is maintained by an active developer community that has produced more than 20 translations, 100 articles/blogs, 100,000 lines of codese and 1,500,000 downloads from more than 190 countries. The ZK framework has been deployed by several Fortune Global 500 companies, including Barclays, eBay, Deutsche Bank, Sony, Sun Microsystems, EMC and Toyota. It supports a number of third-party widgets, including Google Maps, JFreeChart, JasperReports, FCKeditor, Timeplot, ExtJS, Timeline and Dojo.

Potix is best known for its ZK-based Direct RIA architecture, a pure Java application engine designed to "simplify and speed up the creation, deployment, and maintenance of rich Internet apps." By programming user interfaces directly, the company says, Web app development becomes "as intuitive as programming desktop applications."

A free evaluation copy of ZK Pivottable 1.0 can be downloaded now from the ZK Web site here.

About the Author

John K. Waters is the editor in chief of a number of Converge360.com sites, with a focus on high-end development, AI and future tech. He's been writing about cutting-edge technologies and culture of Silicon Valley for more than two decades, and he's written more than a dozen books. He also co-scripted the documentary film Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, which aired on PBS.  He can be reached at [email protected].

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