I found some documentation about interop with OpenOffice using technologies like COM, but before delving in more deeply I wondered if anyone's worked on this kind of thing?
We have a need for the following, all wrapped up in a method call from a client PC (client talks to server using COM):
Client sends a map of name/value pairs to a server app
Server opens a Word template (.dot currently) file and looking up bookmarks using names from 1, replaces the text with values
Server saves file as a Word .doc file
We were doing this using Word but some changes in Windows 2008 mean if you run without a desktop/interactive-user, Word won't start. It's obviously a big hack but we're looking for a quick solution rather than re-engineering due to time constraints... so I wondered if we can simply run up OO Writer on the server to do the same job? I know how ugly it all is so don't really need suggestions to create a brand new C# open XML SDK application.
Multiple simultaneous requests can be ruled out as a potential problem (or at least it's never been a problem using Word so unless OO is different it'll be ignored).
If you are thinking OpenOffice might help, you could use JODReports or Docmosis to help, though you'd need a small Java program to bridge from your C++ app (cmd line or whatever). These tools will let you control OpenOffice a little easier for doing your merge task than working with the OO API directly (hopefully a lower learning curve).
Related
I hope you are doing good and i really appreciate your help here for my query.
We have our system T3000 written in C++ (http://www.temcocontrols.com/ftp/software/9TstatSoftware.zip and codes are available here https://github.com/temcocontrols/T3000_Building_Automation_System).
I am trying to integrate 'BIRT reporting tool' in my C++ application. I want to create report based on the data available in our T3000 system. I think BIRT is embeddable (??). We don't need to compile and change the project, just need to be able to call it from T3000.exe mainly.
My thinking is we may put one menu label in existing T3000 and try to display report in user single click.
Can you please help me to solve my issue with 'BIRT' ? I really appreciate your answer.
Regards
Raju
Well, the answer depends on what your definition of "embeddable" is.
BIRT is written in pure Java.
I could think of 3 different ways:
Of course it is possible to integrate Java code into an existing C/C++ program (see Embed Java into a C++ application?).
You could just use the BIRT runtime engine and generate the report as PDF or HTML from the command line (that means, basically you call the java executable from your program with several arguments). See Birt - How to run report engine on the console? and http://eclipser-blog.blogspot.de/2008/02/automatic-generation-of-birt-reports.html for more information.
You could run a Java web server like Tomcat in a second process and then start your report by calling a http URL (e.g. you could use the included Servlet example). See http://www.eclipse.org/birt/documentation/integrating/viewer-usage.php
Similar to 3. (see below)
Some notes:
The second option is slow, due to the Java and BIRT engine startup overhead (this may take several seconds). With the first and third option, the startup overhead is or can be minimized to only once (and for each report).
For the second and third option it may be necessary to modify the existing code of the example programs to suit your needs.
The first option is probably the best for an industry-quality solution, but it is also the most difficult to develop.
Anyway, Java skills are necessary IMHO.
If you plan to run this on a SOC instead of a PC, take performance into account.
Is a Java-based solution well-suited for this kind of hardware? BIRT needs quite a lot of RAM and CPU (for a SOC). Hardware like the Raspi 3 should handle this quite easily, I reckon.
I integrated the BIRT runtime into an existing Python application (all this running on an application server) in a fourth way: I wrote a listener program that listens on a TCP socket for BIRT tasks. It uses a pool of worker processes (written in Java) which in turn use the BIRT report engine to generate the output. The client program (here: written in Python) opens a TCP connection to the listener and uses this socket to tell it which report to generate (including report parameters and destination file name). The listener program then in turn chooses a worker process for the task and gives the task to the worker process.
So, basically, this fourth option is similar to the third one, with two differences:
The communication is socket-based (instead of http), allowing bi-di communication.
The architecture is multi-processes instead of multi-threading. We choose this because very large reports could cause out-of-memory errors for otherwise unrelated reports that just happen to run at the same time. It's the same basic architecture Oracle chose for their reports server.
However, developing the programs took months.
HVB: I have to give you more than a simple thanks for the explanation above, this info will save us time I am sure. Raju will be sharing our experience after we get into the project a little deeper so others can benefit.
Hei there, I'm not experienced at all in C++ as I need to start learning year the next year at my university, though, I've been creating a browser based game and I'm looking for someone to transform it into pc app.
Though, I'm wondering how to make that application send a http request via POST to a file on my webserver with the username / pw.
After all the tutotials I've been reading, I concluded that none worth spending my time with, because they all based on own database, and I'm looking for one that connects to a maestro server and requests the data from there.
This may not be the answer you are looking for, but you may consider two alternatives to a more pure C++ application.
If you already have a working browser game, try to take that same code and put the html/javascript/whatever in a file and give the file a ".hta" extention. It basically opens inside a browser to run your files, but it acts more like an application from the user's viewpoint. (And, as much as I hate Windows, they're pretty fun to create if I may say so). However, your source code with this option is easily read because it can be renamed to a text file (or html file).
You could use Visual C++ (or VB.net, which you have tagged to the question, as well as "Visual" C#) to create an application which mostly consists of a browser view. It could be a "standalone" application (however would rely completely on the .Net framework - may or may not be what you want) that basically accomplishes the same as the option above, but adds that you can "hide" your files inside your application.
Using the two above alternatives, you could make an application relatively quickly that would load your files, which I assume you have already created. Note that neither of the above alternatives will work on anything other than Windows OS's.
If the two above alternatives are not what you want, or if you have questions about either one, I'd be glad to attempt to help.
I've been able to find a friend that would do it in Delphi because I wouldn't want users to download net framework just for this ap.
So the program that would fit most for any apps is Delphi Prism XE (even if it's an addon of Visual Studio)
Is there a relatively easy way to display the output of a C++ program on a webpage? And I don't mean manually, in other words, you see it on a webpage as it runs not as in I make a code tag and write it in myself.
EDIT: Just so everybody can get this clear I am going to post this up here. I am NOT trying to make a webpage in C++. Please excuse me if this sounds spiteful or anything but I am getting a lot of answers relating to that.
Step one, get yourself a server-side language. Be that PHP, ASP, Python, Ruby, whatever. Get it set up so you can serve it.
Step two, find your language's exec equivalent. Practically all of them have them. It'll let you run a command as if it were from the command line, usually with arguments and capture the output. Here's PHP's:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.exec.php
Of course, if you're passing user-input as arguments, sanitise!
I've just seen that you accepted Scott's answer. I usually wouldn't chase up a SO thread so persistently but I fear you're about to make a mistake that you'll come to regret down the line. Giving direct access to your program and its own built-in server is a terrible idea for two reasons:
You waste a day implementing this built-in server and then getting it to persist and testing it
More importantly, you've just opened up another attack vector into your server. When it comes to security, keep it simple.
You're far better having your C++ app running behind another (mature) server side language as all the work is done for you and it can filter the input to keep things safe.
You could write a CGI app in C++, or you could use an existing web server language to execute the command and send the output to the client.
You want to use Witty.
Wt (pronounced 'witty') is a C++
library for developing interactive web
applications.
The API is widget-centric and similar
to desktop GUI APIs. To the developer,
it offers complete abstraction of any
web-specific implementation details,
including event handling, graphics
support, graceful degradation (or
progressive enhancement), and pretty
URLs.
Unlike many page-based frameworks, Wt
was designed for creating stateful
applications that are at the same time
highly interactive (leveraging
techinques such as AJAX to their
fullest) and accessible (supporting
plain HTML browsers), using automatic
graceful degradation or progressive
enhancement.
The library comes with an application
server that acts as a stand-alone web
server or integrates through FastCGI
with other web servers.
I am not sure this is what you are looking for but you may want CGI You may want to look at this SO question, C++ may not be the best language for what you want to do.
based off the questions you posted Writing a web app like what you want is no simple task. What I would recommend is use some other library (this is one i found with a quick google) to get a web console on your server and give the user it is running under execute deny permissions on every folder except the folder you have your app installed.
This is still is a risky method if you don't set up the security correctly but it is the easiest solution without digging around too much on existing libraries to just have the application interactive.
EDIT --
The "Best" solution is learn AJAX and have your program post its own pages with it but like I said, it will not be easy.
It sounds like you want something like a telnet session embedded in a webpage. A quick google turns up many Java telnet apps, though I'm not qualified to evaluate which would be most ideal to embed in html.
You would set up the login script on the host machine to run your c++ app and the user would interact with it through the shell window. Note though that this will only work for pure command line apps. If you want to use a GUI app in this way, then you should look into remote desktop software or VNC.
It may be worth looking into Adobe's "Alchemy" project on Adobe Labs
This may help you with what you're trying to achieve.
:)
Are you looking for something like what codepad.org does? I believe they explain how they did it here.
There is a library called C++ Server Pages - Poco. I used it for one of my college project, its pretty good. There is also good documentation to get started with, u can find it here http://pocoproject.org/docs/
For a current project, we're designing a client desktop application that parses text files and interfaces with a web based database.
So far we've split the project into parts:
(Third-Party Program) -> (Our Desktop Client) -> (Our Parsing Library #1 and #2) -> (Our Web Server) -> (Our Verification Library) -> (Our Database)
We've hit confusion when it comes to choosing the correct way (and the best language) to make these pieces work together.
The third-party program's output is a simple text file, and we're just parsing it into a SQL-esque format for insertion into our database after verifying the numbers are in a certain range.
The first question we have is regarding the client language itself. We're planning on writing the parser libraries in C++ as they're just mostly text management. Our desktop client needs to be cross-platform for Windows and Mac. Currently we're leaning towards writing this in Java using Swing and the JNI. However, we realize there's a lot of hate for Java and that we'd have to worry about bundling in the JRE.
Is Java a good choice in this situation? Our other options seem to be writing this also in C++ using something like Qt for the GUI, or going platform specific and writing the windows version in .NET and then a Mac specific version. Our Windows community is the vast majority of users.
Our second issue is connecting this client with our web server. Originally we were just going to use an http POST to upload the file. We could also FTP the file which seems like overkill. We started to explore web services but were not sure if a web service could handle large amounts of text data.
Is there an easier way to do this? Everything is text, so it's no problem to send them in chunks or one giant string. If we go the web services route, will that effect our language choice for the desktop client?
There are definitely hundreds of ways to handle something like this, but most of these concepts are new for us. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Qt is an excellent choice and as it's native C++ it will be easy to integrate with your parsers too. Why write two versions when a single Qt version will run fine on both platforms with native look and feel? Depending on the license you choose you can even statically link Qt if you're concerned about deployment complexity.
A web service would generally have no problem handling large amounts of text and pretty much any language will interact with it easily assuming basic network I/O functionality. Depending on the language you will probably be able to find libraries that do most of the work for you, assuming it's not already supported natively.
As you say, there are many different ways to do what you want to achieve. There is no right or wrong way but obviously some designs will suit your needs better than others.
What simple tools would you recommend to read a text file of addresses, send each record separately to a web service for geocoding, and save the batch of results as a text file?
Looking for no-frills component(s) with usage examples, for minimal code-from-scratch. Language irrelevant as long as dev environment is easy to install.
Requirements
- usable by unsophisticated programmer
- low or no cost
- runs under Windows.
Second thought:
How easy would this be to do inside a browser using JavaScript and a library or two?
I'd go for Java and use a flat file parsing library like jFFP or Flatworm
These libraries are pretty easy to understand and to use (I've worked with both of them in the past) and they both provide code samples.
Spring Integration would be another good option but the learning curve might be too big if you are not familiar with Spring and it might be overkill for your simple workflow.
Actually, in your case, I think I'd choose Flatworm for the parsing. You'll find code samples on its website or in How to read and parse flat files in Java. And you could even use it to write your output file like in Writing flat files in Java with Flatworm).
For the SOAP part, I'd use the JAX-WS Reference Implementation (which is included in the JDK 6 so you won't have to add any library if you are using Java 6) and Netbeans IDE. Netbeans IDE has very good support for developing JAX-WS Web Services Client (or here for later versions of Netbeans) and should really ease the process. Once the various classes generated, calling the web service is a matter of 3 lines of code as shown in the examples of the provided links:
// Call Web Service Operation
com.cdyne.ws.Check service = new com.cdyne.ws.Check();
com.cdyne.ws.CheckSoap port = service.getCheckSoap();
// TODO initialize WS operation arguments here
java.lang.String bodyText = "";
java.lang.String licenseKey = "";
// TODO process result here
com.cdyne.ws.DocumentSummary result = port.checkTextBody(bodyText, licenseKey);
Given the generic nature of the requirements, the relatively simple workflow, but its potential to bring a few twists and turns in the design (for example, the need of using https rather than http for webservices, the need of producing some odd token for authentication, or some fancy marshaling or conversion etc.) it might be best to use a modern script language. A very basic plan could be to use a plain shell script (a bat file), base on curl and a few other command line utilities, but this approach may not be flexible enough to deal with some requirements; instead languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby would be much preferable.
This would provide a low entry barrier, the ability to test elements of the application interactively before putting them into a formal script, and to leverage extensive libraries to deal with the various requirements that may arise, such as the storage of configuration parameters, parsing detail, output format, webservices, maths associated with geo positions etc. etc.
My inclination would be to use Python, but as said most other modern dynamic languages would do.
I would use XMLunit with Eclipse IDE, + JUnit, and JDK1.6 . A finished program that does this might only be 100 lines of code. It's doable by someone who is a novice programmer...
When the program is done you can compile as an .exe file for future use.
I would choose "Strawberry Perl" as my second choice for programming language. Python is slightly harder to use I think.