Here’s a short screencast demo of Dabble DB, one of the more exciting offerings in the endless stream of new Web 2.0 apps. It’s a web-based database, aimed at casual users. Microsoft Access on the web, kind of.
It’s not public yet, but the screencast shows off the features very well: rich import and export options, schema evolution, very polished UI.
Roger Jennings has an in-depth look at the Web-based DB marketplace.
I wonder if they will offer an API that makes it possible to build a database-driven web site with a Dabble backend. That would be awesome, even if it’s read-only.
Now imagine something like Dabble DB where you can have virtual tables whose items are loaded from an RSS feed or from something like a SPARQL query. I’m pretty sure that we’ll get something like that in 2006 or 2007, maybe not from Dabble, but from some other confluence of Web 2.0 applications and crappy data formats. That’s the kind of idea that brought me into the Semantic Web world, and it’s good to see a workable solution approaching on the horizon.