Came across this start up - PAW.

I must congratulate Mr. Rajat Gupta for venturing into software products. The product space is very empty with almost every one else wanting to start one more web2.0 website with no real revenue generation capabilites!

Coming to PAW 1.0 - as the name indicates this is a work bench to crunch data. I am not aware of any product that is operating in this area at an entry level. There could be some high end tools available with business intelligence products - but there certainly isnt’ a tool at individual user level - this seems to be a boon for people who are used to juggle multiple excel files every day (such as me ) for various things.

Well, I thought so and downloaded the trial copy of the product. First there was a disclaimer that by clicking download button, I am automatically subscribed to thier mailing list! What ever happened to opt-in features?

Next, after downloading the 46 MB file, I was forced to download JDK1.6. May be PAW  could consider running with any of the older versions of JDK as well - at least JDK1.4 - instead of forcing to upgrade.  Also, considering that most people who are going to use PAW would be non-programmers and dont really understand Java, they might as well consider bundling JDK along with thier software (thought it can bloat up the entire stuff).

After JDK is installed, installation of PAW itself was pretty straight forward. Once I got the software finally up and running (after getting and entering the eval copy of license key) and some moving around the UI to familiarize myself with the UI, I started my exercise of importing an existing simple excel (of around 170 odd rows)  - PAW has thrown a dialog box indicating “Run in background” - but I was not allowed to click it as the screen sort of frozen. After some time got an ArrayIndexOutOfBounds exception - not a very good thing.  After some analysis figured out that the reason for that is the mistake I made during importing the excel (I specified an incorrect cell as a starting point) - I corrected my mistake and this time the data is imported into the workbench instantly. Then I loaded another similar sheet - with an intention of merging with the earlier sheet. I could not figure out how the merge worked as I could not see any change in the data set after the merge.

I decided to restart the application to start everything afresh - but now getting an NullPointerException dialog at the time of starting. Though the software comes up after this, nothing happens on clicking the menu items.

In addition, the console keeps displaying all sorts of exception/error messages like “could not initilize logger”, “could not convert date” - not a pleasant sight.

There are other features like PAW Exchange available as per the product website, but haven’t really used.

Bottomline, seems interesting product, but could not make it work with the eval license - has a really long way to go.

Filed under: Java, Startup, Technology