14 August 2003

For BI Beans developers looking to extend the integration between their projects and Microsoft Excel, the Java Excel API project is developing an open-source Java API which allows developers to read Excel spreadsheets, and to generate Excel spreadsheets dynamically. In addition, it contains a mechanism which allows java applications to read a spreadsheet, modify cells, and write the new spreadsheet. According to the project website; “This API allows any operating system which can run a Java virtual machine (i.e., not just Windows) to both process and deliver Excel spreadsheets. Because it is Java, this API may be invoked from within a servlet, thus giving access to Excel spreadsheets over internet and intranet web applications. API Feature Reads data from Excel 95, 97, 2000 workbooks   Reads and writes formulas (Excel 97 and later)  Generates spreadsheets in Excel 97 format Supports font, number and date formatting   Supports shading and colouring of cells   Modifies existing worksheets Is internationalized, enabling processing in almost any locale, country, language, or character encoding (formulas are currently only supported in English, French, Spanish, and German, but more can be added if translated)” Sounds excellent, and it seems a good way to go beyond the current CSV Export functionality found within BI Beans. On a similar theme, further integration with Microsoft Excel is of course one of the features we’d most like to see with Oracle 9i OLAP. Oracle Express Server has for many years had an Excel Addin, a plug in to Microsoft Excel that allows you to directly query an Express database using the Express Selector, bringing data into the spreadsheet and allowing you to work with a live dataset in the same way as an ODBC datasource. Quite a few Oracle users looking to implement Oracle OLAP have asked when a similar product for Oracle 9i OLAP will be available, and, whilst you can achieve much the same results using SQL Views against the analytic workspace delivered via ODBC and the ‘get external data’ feature of Excel, this wouldn’t give you the equivalent of the Selector, restricting the complexity of the multidimensional queries you could put together. Rumours of an Excel integrator for 9i OLAP have been around for a while now, hopefully Oracle will have some good news for us in the near future. 3:19:08 PM

Brian Duff breaks the news that Oracle Jdeveloper 9.0.5 is now going to be know as Oracle Jdeveloper 10G. It’s been his task to search-and-replace all instances of 9.0.5 with 10G in the Jdeveloper code base, but in his spare time he’s put together an article on the top ten toys for Java programmers in Jdeveloper 10G. It’s great that people like Brian are putting together features like this, and I know that personally I’m more inclined to use, and persevere with, products such as Jdeveloper when the developers behind it make an effort to engage with their users. Oracle are holding Expert testing sessions for Jdeveloper down at Reading at the moment, and because of our contact with people like Brian, and because of how central Jdeveloper is to our development process, we’ve taken one of our best consultants out for a few days to take part in the session, hopefully giving feedback to the development team and getting more of an insight into the context of the product. 3:17:26 PM