Today the first publicly available Silk site has launched: The Next Web Index!
The Next Web Index is a technology companies database that runs on the Silk platform. The content has been created by The Next Web and is partially based on data from Wikipedia and TechCrunch’s CrunchBase. It contains profiles for over 73,000 companies, 88,000 persons and 6,000 related organizations. Think companies like Groupon, Netflix and Tumblr, persons such as Steve Ballmer, Elon Musk and Jerry Yang, related organizations such as Atomico and Y Combinator, and products such as Google TV.
The Next Web Index is a powerful resource for finding information about technology companies. Silk’s added value becomes particularly clear as you enter explore mode, which lets you search, sort and view the information in a breeze. Use the controls on the left to find the information you’re looking for. Generate sophisticated overviews such as CEOs under 30 who have raised over $1 Million in early funding rounds.
The Index is still work in progress. The editors from The Next Web are updating the content continuously, but as of today it’s out there to be enjoyed by everyone. The pages contain feedback links and all contributions are greatly appreciated by the TNW team.
This is a great day for us here at Silk. Finally everyone can see what we’ve been working on the past two years. The next step is the launch of the Silk editor, which lets everyone create Silk sites like The Next Web Index.
If you didn’t request an invite yet, make sure to request it on our homepage.
Investment will bring groundbreaking technology and product to market
Amsterdam, The Netherlands – May 18, 2011 – Silk, the Amsterdam-based web startup, today announced that it has completed a €320,000 ($475,000) funding round led by Atomico, the venture capital firm led by Niklas Zennström, who also co-founded Skype.
Other investors participating in the round are Floris Rost van Tonningen, co-founder of Hyves, the largest social network in the Netherlands, Han de Groot, founder of MetrixLab, Hans-Poul Veldhuyzen van Zanten and Mark de Lange, who is Founding Partner of Global Grid Capital.
Silk is a web-based tool that allows content creators to provide their content in a more structured manner on the web. The tool enables users to choose the data they want from the mass of information available and to view and arrange it in ways that make sense to them.
It is at the forefront of the “Web 3.0″ trend that helps users interact with the huge and growing volume of information online. A video explanation of the product is available at http://www.silkapp.com/.
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At typLAB, we primarily use two programming languages: Javascript and Haskell. Haskell has a compiler, strong static typing, and is pure (no state or side-effects) by default. Javascript, on the other hand, is interpreted, dynamically typed, and, when using objects, uses lots of state (since objects are an encapsulation of state). This makes testing Javascript more important: otherwise, a typo in a variable name might go undetected until someone uses our product.
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In this post we will explore some boundaries of functional programming in Javascript and show how easy it is to implement a set of combinators that can express functions similar to queries in XPath and similar to transformations in XSLT. We call the result a combinator library because we implement a few primitive queries and transformations and allow combining these into bigger ones using some basic composition functions. As we will show, all functions will follow more or less the same structure.
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In a previous post, Sebas explained that we use so-called XML picklers to convert Haskell data types to XML. Since these picklers have a regular structure, we don’t write them by hand, but derive them automatically using generic programming techniques. In this post, I’ll explain how our generic XML pickler works. The code shown here has been made available on hackage.
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Why we don’t support Internet Explorer
We’ve already talked about some of the technology choices we’re making as a company. And while our choices on the back-end can hardly be labeled as mainstream, the most difficult choice we actually had to make was related to the client-side as it directly affects our users. Obviously, Javascript on the client is a given, and we love it. However, as most web developers know, the differences between browsers are enormous and developing for all of them is almost impossible. Still, current conventional wisdom dictates that you should support recents versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox and the WebKit based browsers (basically, Safari and Google Chrome). We, however, have decided to drop Internet Explorer support entirely.
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Since typLAB is all about exploring new ways of creating and consuming online content we figured our software might want to keep track of what’s happening inside a document.
All modern browsers have support for W3C’s mutation events. Safari, Chrome, FireFox and Opera all do them. But not all do all of them.
Notably WebKit fails to fire DOMAttrModified events when an attribute is changed. It does however fire the DOMSubtreeModified event after an attribute is modified. So at least that gives us something to work with until the good folks at WebKit squash the bug.
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Here at typLAB it wasn’t evident from the beginning what would be the best choice for a storage back-end. We knew that we were about to build a web based editor and would be dealing with a lot of HTML5 documents with lots of meta data. After some careful consideration we decided to go for an XML database. More specifically, the Berkeley XML Database, lovingly called DBXML by its authors.
We figured that using DBXML would give us some important advantages:
- Collections of HTML5 documents will form the basis of data model. Only one trivial conversion from HTML5 to syntactically valid XML is needed to get our documents into the XML database. Once stored we can perform some interesting queries over our data.
- XML databases allow for the storage of complex data layouts without having a strict schema. Without a schema it will be easier to adjust our data model over time without instantly breaking our software.
- XQuery is a very expressive (almost-purely functional) querying language which is at least as powerful as SQL and far more flexible in the structure of the data to target.
- XML can be used to both encode strictly defined datatypes and store free-form documents in the same document collection. This will enable us to put both our meta data and our documents in the same database.
- A quick look on Hackage revealed there is an out-of-the-box easy-to-use Haskell binding available for the Berkeley XML database. No need to create custom bindings ourselves.
- We are in the advantage (or disadvantage) of having Haskell as our language of choice for our server software. Because of the hierarchical nature of both XML and Haskell algebraic datatypes, an XML database feels like a perfect fit.
Once we decided to go for an DBXML back-end we had to figure out how to easily get values form our Haskell program in and out of the database. The rest of this post will be dealing with the last point of our enumeration: how to get a nice mapping from Haskell’s algebraic datatypes to our DBXML back-end.
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As a newly started company, we have a lot of technical decisions to make. One of the important ones is the choice of a programming language. Since we’re building a web application, this goes for both the client (i.e. the web browser) and the server.
On the client, there wasn’t much discussion. Javascript is the only viable choice, unless you want to use Flash or similar plugin-based models. But on the server, we had more freedom. Popular choices for web applications are dynamically typed languages like Ruby, Python and PHP, and statically typed languages like Java and C#.
However, there was another option. Two of us (me and Sebas) are enrolled in the Software Technology master program at Utrecht University, where we often use the programming language Haskell. Haskell is a functional programming language, which means that a program is composed of expressions instead of statements, as is the case in an imperative programming language.
As you might have guessed from the title of this post, we decided to use Haskell for our server side programming. What are the features that made us choose Haskell?
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This is our lablog, where we will write about the proceedings of typLAB.
‘What’s typLAB then?’, you might ask.
typLAB is our initiative to investigate and develop new ways of creating and consuming web-based content. We aim to explore the boundaries of what’s possible using contemporary internet technologies. The result of our endeavors should enable you to read and write rich, dynamic and smart articles like you’ve never read nor written them before.
Next question. ‘Who are those “we” you keep referring to?’
We are Erik Hesselink, Sebastiaan Visser, Salar al Khafaji and Lon Boonen. That’s the team; small, smart, focused and eager to learn and share. Most of us share a history at Xopus, the web based XML editor.
One more question? ‘What about lablog, what can we expect from it?’
Through lablog we want to inform you of our ponderings and wonderings. Our steps forward, backward and sideways. We’ll write about our progress, our discoveries and the things that make us tick.
You can expect articles on HTML5, CSS3, web development in general, Haskell, XQuery, usability, semantics, JavaScript and all stuff that makes a nerd’s heart jump a beat. Or two.
And we’d love to hear from you. Through the comments, Twitter or plain old e-mail.
