Prasad Joshi

It's quite common for developers to present data from the database (or elsewhere) for analysis by more than one team in an organization. Over the years, Microsoft's Excel has been one of the preferred tools for spreadsheet-type reports. Now, in combination with XML technologies, we can control the formatting of the spreadsheets. With Web-enabled applications so popular, it's customary to give end users the ability to generate the reports themselves. This article discusses the automatic generation of preformatted reports. We'll build an application that has a menu of the available reports or report-generation criteria and the ability to generate preformatted reports in Excel using XML and XSLT. Interim Solution Given that Excel can read from a character-delimited file, we could pull out the data from the database and save it in a TAB DELIMITED text file with a .xls e... (more)

Parasoft SOAPtest

During the past few years we've seen an exponential rise in Web-based applications, and we're currently beginning a transition to a service-oriented Web. Web services technology enables several functional elements (services) to communicate with each other. The key to the success of this technology is the ability to exchange messages between services implemented on disparate platforms. We've embraced SOAP as the protocol for message exchange, and fortunately, it has received a good response from the key players in this technology. Loose coupling is a great feature of Web services... (more)