There's a module for that! Drupal architecture and module development

About a month ago, I started porting Sheetnode to D7. The natives were getting restless on the issue queue, so I thought I would pacify them with some serious porting effort. I am glad to announce that the port was completed a few days ago: Sheetnode 7.x-1.0-beta1 is now available, a fully-functional port of the latest D6 version.

The porting process was surprisingly smooth. I'd been avoiding porting my modules to D7 because it felt like rewriting the same code all over again - and I hate rework.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of maintaining Sheetnode is getting to practice more JavaScript. Douglas Crockford called it the World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language and that's certainly how it's been for me until I decided to put a concerted effort in finding out more about it.

Sheetnode's underlying spreadsheet engine, SocialCalc, is entirely client-side, JavaScript-based.

Sheetnode is one of the most exciting modules that I maintain. The underlying SocialCalc Javascript spreadsheet engine, which I forked from Dan Bricklin's original code, is much fun to work with. Plus, organizations of many sizes are starting to use Sheetnode to collaborate on their numeric data right in their Drupal intranets, instead of relying on Excel files in attachments.

I've just released version 1.5 of Sheetnode for Drupal 6.

I received today an Amazon gift from a Drupal member who's been using my Sheetnode module. What a great surprise! As I've said before, I feel privileged to be part of Drupal's great community, and I will keep contributing my modest efforts to make Drupal the most awesome Web platform. Many thanks Reamur!

I'm no fan of Flash. Even the name annoys me :-) But I feel that recreating its capabilities using the trio HTML/CSS/JavaScript (isn't there an acronym for these 3 interrelated technologies?) is often non-trivial.

A case in point: I recently added to Sheetnode the feature of editing the spreadsheet fullscreen. While every Flash component has a fullscreen option, I couldn't even find a jQuery component that implements this functionality.

Originally published at OpenCraft.

Google Spreadsheets are cool, but their problem is that they are hosted at Google instead of in your intranet portal. That means that they don't integrate easily with your other Web documents, in terms of classification, indexing, permissions, etc. The API provided by Google does help there, it's true. But what about adding new features? Google Docs simply isn't open source, and therefore is not ideal.