Playing With Kirix Strata: The Next Killer App Merges The Web and the Desktop

I remember the era before the spreadsheet, and I was fortunate enough to see Visicalc become the first 'killer app'. It transformed the way people did things, so much so that nowadays spreadsheets have become so mundane that you can pay for powerful spreadsheet software in software bundles - or get them at no cost in open source bundles. Offices use spreadsheets every day for things that were not possible before Visicalc; the computerized spreadsheet allowed people to do so much more automatically that it had a large part to play in personal computer adoption in businesses. In essence, it changed the world.

When I first revisited Kirix Strata in the context of Benford's Law, I was within a rut of thinking that had to do more with what I needed to do (cross referencing land tenancy records against receipts and introducing GIS) than anything else. That focus lead me toward Kirix Strata, and a lot of communication with Ken Kaczmarek and Aaron Williams of Kirix. I downloaded the 30 day trial version of Kirix Strata and started tossing my data at it. Ken and Aaron insisted that they do a webcast with me, and being in my rut of thinking I simply decided to entertain them. After all, how could it hurt?

Foolish Taran. It did hurt. Aaron flew through so much and explained so much that I simply was awash in ideas of how Kirix Strata could be used while Aaron was doing the webcast! It ends up that Kirix Strata is based on a web browser - that it can import data from RSS feeds and external databases on the Internet (once you have access!), and can allow you to run scripts and queries on the data. Immediately. The features of Kirix Strata speak for themselves, but they lack context - and context is king.

This is why the Strata extensions are worth looking into - the Apache Log import extension had me busy for hours, as a webmaster. As a blogger, when Aaron pulled up Digg.com's archives in a database table... I was in awe, and quickly decided to try out Technorati and see what I could come up with (thus the initial image above). Unfortunately, Technorati's data didn't give me much to play with in Kirix Strata after I clicked on the RSS link - which opens up a new tab in the browser and allows one to view the RSS feed in a table:

That by itself is kind of cool - but then you can import it to your local database. And with the Kirix Strata scripting, you could refresh the data now and then and import as well - though you'd probably want to avoid duplicates. The scripting engine is an implementation of Javascript (according to the draft; it looks a lot like C#) and is object oriented - so yes, you have classes and can reuse code. Aaron Williams told me that they couldn't wait for the draft specification to be realized, so Kirix went ahead and did it on it's own.

And from Javascript, you can create your own extensions for Strata - instructions for that are here - and there are more developer resources available here. What this equates to for me is... I have new toys. But what it means for everyone else is that you can tailor. What I did find amusing is that people have commented to Kirix that this could be a plug-in for Firefox. No way, folks. Stay away from the crack pipes.

Converting data on the fly is... awesome. Importing data is a breeze, though importing NULLs is bad practice. You can export to other data sources when you import, so suddenly you're out there transmogrifying data formats with... a browser. Oh, and it does do basic reports in PDF as well.

While Kirix Strata itself isn't open source, I am told that some code is going back to the community as well. Take for example wxAui, which is integrated with wxWidgets - something I would like to think that I had a small bit to do with, since I did mention wxWidgets to Kirix back in 2005... A lot more was said about Open Source by Aaron during the webcast, and I expect to see some more stuff coming out - maybe even the implementation of Javascript according to the draft specification.

I'm still playing with this in a lot of ways, and have been working on a few scripts to get some things automated for myself. I've successfully cross referenced some data for use with some of the land issues I am contending with, but due to the nature of the data I can't make it public. The problem itself was that I had data from various sources (spreadsheets, Microsoft Access and MySQL) that needed to be cross referenced and validated. All of that was actually... easy. Automating some things will take me a little more time as I juggle my life around.

But after years, I actually look forward to getting to the PC and geeking out again. Why? There's gold in that data. Somewhere. And a tool like Kirix Strata, which makes it easy to do, is pure platinum. In my eyes, this is THE killer application of this decade. Go get the free trial, play with it and... have some serious fun with data.