Answers to common questions you may have about Qrowd.
Qrowd is a new entry in the growing market of visual builders for widgets and mashups. Qrowd is an entirely self-contained environment in which software developers can create rich media widgets that non-developers can use to mix, mash, and refine web data.
Unlike Yahoo! Pipes, Qrowd is a fully community-extensible system in which developers can add new parts. Additionally, Qrowd can process any data source on the web, not just RSS feeds. Most importantly, data can be output in Qrowd in media-rich widgets, not just as RSS.
Compared to Microsoft's Popfly, Qrowd generates widgets that can run with either the Flash plugin or browser-native DHTML, versus Microsoft's Silverlight. Microsoft's Silverlight, being an all-new technology, is not as stable as Flash or browser-native DHTML and is not installed on many browsers. Being built upon OpenLaszlo, Qrowd's widgets can take advantage of other runtimes that OpenLaszlo supports in the future, which may well include Silverlight when it matures.
Unlike either Pipes or Popfly, Qrowd supports sub-assemblies, which are re-usable collections of parts that provide modular functionality. Sub-assemblies can also be nested, such that sub-assemblies can contain other sub-assemblies. Sub-assemblies greatly simplify the building of complex web apps by modularizing functionality.
Parts and assemblies created with Qrowd run in either the browser or on the Qrowd server using OpenLaszlo. Assemblies that contain an output part that is visual run entirely within the browser using either the Flash or DHTML runtime. Assemblies that contain an output part that generate server-side output like RSS run entirely on the Qrowd server.
Qrowd's most basic functionality was completed in January 2008. Now that the low-level functionality is in place, some more time is needed to create some sample parts and assemblies to both iron out any remaining wrinkles and to also demonstrate what is possible with Qrowd. During this period of time, only a select few people will have access to Qrowd to both help find issues and to help provide early feedback.
As long as is needed to get Qrowd ready for the general public. The current target is sometime early spring 2008.
Please send an e-mail to support@qrowd.com if you are interested.