Representing Excel Spreadsheet in an online application

Suppose you have inherited a massive spreadsheet which contains lots and lots of data. The problem is that data in that spreadsheet is always changing, is hard to maintain and tend to cause management's hair loss.

I'd like to find a way to represent the data found in Excel in some database and prepare a web applicati开发者_如何学Con to interact with that database. There will need to be an eye pleasing web front end which would act as a View for the Model hidden in the Oracle underneath.

To take care of the web app part, i am thinking Ruby on Rails.

What do you think?

(performance is not an issue)

(scalability is not an issue)

Any MVC/MTV framework will work for what you're describing. RoR is perfectly well suited to this sort of thing as are: Lift, Django, Pylons/Pyramid, Camping, Web2Py, Plone (yes I said Plone), LuCI, and many many others.

You mentioned Oracle as a back end. This may suggest that your organization is big on overpriced 'enterprise-y' software and probably uses Java. Lift is written in/for Scala which runs on the JVM. Web2Py runs on Jython (java implementation of Python). I'm not sure whether Rails runs on JRuby but then there is always Groovy and Grails too. All of them can connect to Oracle (and other databases)

It's confusing when you say "To take care of the web part". These frameworks take care of the web part (view/template) as well as the datastore and can even export that data (model) to other formats (controller/view).

You'll want to look at one of the AJAXy datagrid widgets if you want to present the data in a nice scrollable and dynamically sortable format.

I hope that helps

Yes, Ruby on Rails is excellent for this type of thing. I have done exactly what you have described; created Rails apps for things which were previously stored in Excel.

Using JRuby, Rails apps can take advantage of Java libraries, which enable you to use POI, for example, to create a very nice Excel download (for when the PHB wants his Excel back).

Good luck!