Viewpoint from the Web

Javaworld has an interesting article on using OpenOffice as the server for a web based spreadsheet like Google Spreadsheets. They use servlets running on Tomcat to communicate with OpenOffice.org, while using Dojo for the web tier.

It handles all the standard spreadsheet functions, but I’m thinking this could be a very useful resource for people needing web based mathematical/statistical applications. It appears you can integrate it with a Java/J2EE application with a little effort, saving you from reinventing the wheel.

Links:
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-05-2008/jw-05-spreadsheets.html

If you have a working instance of apache and a working instance of glassfish, you can get them working together, i.e. have apache handle all the incoming http and let it forward any jsp or servlet calls to glassfish.

You’ll need to dowload and setup mod_jk for apache.

Then you’ll need to follow the instructions in
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/jfarcand/archive/2006/03/running_glassfi_1.html

As per the instruction, you will need the tomcat-ajp.jar file from Tomcat 5.5.16.

NOTE: The latest version of Tomcat 5.5 at the time of writing this is 5.5.25 and it will not work. You will get an error message like NoSuchMethodError getContentLengthLong in your glassfish log. So, save yourself a lot of time and frustration and stick to 5.5.16.

The rest should be obvious from the instructions.

Update: Looks like the tomcat-ajp issue is fixed for version 2.1, and it works with Tomcat 5.5.26. Thanks Amy for the update. I didn’t even know my post had made it to the glassfish issue tracker! Though, perhaps I should have followed open source developer etiquette and entered the issue in there myself!