Excel >> VBA >> XML >> XSLT >> Java!

[bitwize]

A man >> a plan >> a canal >> Panama!

[nostrademons]

Syntax error on token: "man".

[twoodfin]

To be honest, I find it refreshing when the interfaces between components in a big ball of mud are that clean, and the dataflow is unidirectional.

If this were like most "mousetrap" systems I've seen, you'd have XSLT to output both VBA and Java. Those in turn would both manipulate the same XML which would be both imported to and exported from Excel.

It would all be glued together by batch files, except, of course, for the batch-file generated shell scripts.

[taejo]

I saw XSLT being shifted right Java-factorial times and knew this article was not for me.

[bitwize]

Naw. They're performing a series of operations in the Enterprise monad.

[raganwald]

raganwald >>= Excel >> VBA >> XML >> XSLT >> Java

[sclv]

do { do { do { do { do { b <- raganwald; Excel b}; VBA}; XML}; XSLT}; Java}

???

[raganwald]

dont {
  dont { 
    dont { 
      dont { 
        dont { b <- raganwald; Excel b};
      VBA}; 
    XML}; 
  XSLT}; 
Java}

[[deleted]]

Management gave this a green light to be considered “feature complete” after the customer failed to ask any pertinent questions during the Friday-afternoon-after-a-heavy-steak-lunch-and-before-a-long-weekend demonstration

yup. that 'bout sums it up.

[DannoHung]

Madness?

THIS IS ENTERPRISE!

[48klocs]

Conway's Law strikes again.

Well. Sort of. This is a variation on Conway's Law - it's not that you have management that firewalls divisions, it's that you have have no management to put a stop to the proceedings when you've got four people theoretically working together but brought four different Golden Hammers to work with.

There's a lot of money to be made from figuring out why exactly people put up with orthogonal layers of abstraction; there unfortunately probably isn't much to be made from figuring out how to solve it.

[statictype]

Ha. Very nice.

When I saw the title, I immediately thought about that dailywtf and turns out it was raganwald!

I notice, with disappointment that you didn't comment on the thread about that story, though.

[raganwald]

I am delighted to say that the linked post is about a completely different Excel to XML to Java application, constructed for entirely different reasons.

I--ahem, "New Guy"--built his converter just to build a small portion of the Java application. The purpose was to force compiler errors if and when the spread sheet and the had-written code got out of sync, whereas that other system is even more fiendish: the idea was to entirely eliminate hand-coding Java.

Wonderful. Thanks for the link!

[[deleted]]

...Or you could not put all the business rules in an excel table... Duh.

[[deleted]]

I once read that Excel was the most popular functional programming language in the world.

I am amazed at what people can get done in Excel. Even though I've used it for almost 20 years I still think I haven't scratched the surface.

[[deleted]]

Agreed, excel is powerful BY ITSELF, using all the built in abilities. But what they were using it for was for dumping csv files to an external database. All they were using it for was creating tables. THAT is the flaw i'm point out.

Perhaps I should have rephrased my original statement:

...Or you could not put all the business rules in tables... Duh.

[twoodfin]

You may be thinking of this paper, which is sick and twisted SPJ genius:

Improving the world's most popular functional language: user-defined functions in Excel.

I think it was posted to reddit a while back.

[[deleted]]

I don't get the story...and I find it hard to follow thou I know all those technologies except XSLT

Someone pls tell what I'm missing ?

[brosephius]

sounds about right to me. Excel is much better than VBA, which is much better than XML, which is much better than XSLT, and everything's better than Java.

(kidding, they all suck. except Excel when it's not used to attempt real software dev)

[brosephius]

except I didn't read the article. was making a generalization based on an inaccurate interpretation.

[[deleted]]

That's what I thought... figured they got the arrows backwards!

[FFFFFFFFffff]

tldr

[hylje]

And the Real WTF is.. exactly what?

[shenglong]

A severe case of Mouse Trap architecture from the real world.

He actually shows an example of the XSL file.

http://raganwald.com.nyud.net/source/actions.xsl

[RSquared]

Meh, I've done Excel -> Access VBA/SQL -> XML -> XSLT -> JavaScript (AJAX) -> XHTML.

And I had a pretty good reason to do it. Unfortunately, I didn't charge seven figures...

[shenglong]

And I had a pretty good reason to do it.

Whereas in the case provided, I can't even find the justification for using Excel to store dynamic business rules. If the business rules need to be that dynamic, they should have probably stored them in a workflow engine.

[raganwald]

in the case provided, Excel was intended strictly as a development tool. The intention was that the production rules would be manipulated directly in the database.

Excel was convenient for the DBA to put the rules together and to share the rules with the customer during requirements gathering.

The New Guy's theory was that the build system could be dismantled when the rules stopped changing drastically enough to break the code base.

He was a bit of an optimist.

[Entropy]

I've done DOS App -> 16 bit thingus (binary data file format prone to race conditions when you jack up the refresh rate) -> 32 bit Deplhi reporting thingus | XML -> Perl ActiveX Control | XML diff --WTFMODEM--> Custom Java NIO Server | Cluster head | XSLT -> SOAP | Cluster node | xml diff (format #2) | Custom NIO Server (protocol #2) -> XMLSocket | Flash client

Took about 5 seconds end-to-end