In designing and building a spreadsheet application we saw that it is relatively simple to implement quite sophisticated user interaction by making full use of the jQuery and jQuery UI libraries and choosing wisely from the wide array of available additional plugins like jEditable.

However, although our spreadsheet application was served from the CherryPy server, the functionality of the application was limited to client-side activity only. For example, there is no possibility to save or load a spreadsheet on the server, and neither is there a way to limit the access to our spreadsheet to authorized users only. Both requirements depend on ways to store data in a persistent manner and dealing with persistence will be the next step on our road to developing web applications.