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By Mike Vizard - March 2010

JavaScript Meets Excel in the Cloud

One of the most popular development languages on the Web is JavaScript. One of the most popular applications on the desktop is Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Bringing those two environments together online creates a lot of new possibilities when it comes to deploying complex Excel applications on the Web that foster collaboration.

That’s the goal of Pagos, which is gearing up to add JavaScript support to its SpreadsheetLIVE offering, formally coming out of beta next month.

People have married JavaScript with Excel before, but doing so online adds new dimensions to the concept. According to Pagos CEO Dr. Ugur Kadakal, end users want the collaboration benefits of online without having to sacrifice their familiar Excel spreadsheets. The challenge many of them have, however, is that they need to develop applications on top of Excel. But the macros they use for local applications don’t work in a Web environment, so Pagos plans to offer JavaScript as an alternative approach for building complex Excel applications on the Web