Monday, August 15, 2011

MS-Excel: Defending my choice

The examples I have outlined (see old post) have opted to develop using primarily Excel + VBA (we will use some PHP as well). Some of you may cringe at this choice -given that many in this industry are proficient in languages such as PHP, Ruby and Java... But my reasoning is simply that I wanted to develop examples using a tool that is available to most end-users.

Also this is not really a blog about coding, but more about showing with practical examples what can be done with OAS API. Additionally, Excel will allow us to avoid side issues such as some basic math -which we will not have to code for, we can simply use the spreadsheet. To avoid a lot of overhead in learning how to use SOAP through Excel, I have made available through SourceForge (link) a DLL which should facilitate access to the API.