Saturday, December 25, 2010

I am currently in the best seat in an IMAX 3-D version of Tron Legacy!!!! Been waiting most of my adult life for this sequel. Lol...

Friday, December 17, 2010

JSF 2.0 paper coming

I am on the hook to present JSF 2.0 New Features presentation to the NoVAJUG February 17 or so. It should be fun. JSF 2.0 is really cool. I will publish this presentation to slideshare when I get it fleshed out.

J-Integra

On the project I am at now we are using a product called J-Integra for COM. It allows us to control Excel (in our case...probably any MS Office tool) through DCOM in Java. We tried things like Apache POI and Actuate BIRT Spreadsheet Engine/API first, but the spreadsheet we had to control had visual basic macros in it which called C++ DLL's. And Java does not (yet) understand anything about VBA, so those efforts did not work for us.

The set up of J-Integra is fairly minimal. There is a license xml file which is emailed to you upon request, and you must rebuild their product's JAR files using their JAR rebuild command. Then you have 30 days.

At that time you can run something called comtojava (I think) and it generates a great many java/class files which do the DCOM calls. There are also a lot of interfaces in there defined.

The result is that you can open/create a workbook, manipulate it, and close the book. The opening actually opens a copy of Excel, so you have pretty much complete API access. It is almost like a testing tool.

Hope this helps.