All at sea with Xcelsius

You know how sometimes you pick up a product that is just amazing and you can't put it down? Soon the day has zipped past followed by the night and then the next morning and you discover that there's not enough coffee on the planet to keep you awake.

Welcome to our world. We've just put in a few marathon sessions like that after we had an "ah-ha" moment. Our friend and neighbor has just gone off to sea on the USS Nimitz for six months, which is no sea cruise, even though it sorta looks like one.

After a few days on the briny, the Commander e-mailed us a spreadsheet that was circulating on the ship. The spreadsheet (for some unfathomable reason called the Short Timers Clock) calculates the duration of the mission along with how much time has elapsed and how much remains. We looked at this and thought, "Why not wrap that up as a dashboard?"

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You know how sometimes you pick up a product that is just amazing and you can't put it down? Soon the day has zipped past followed by the night and then the next morning and you discover that there's not enough coffee on the planet to keep you awake.

Welcome to our world. We've just put in a few marathon sessions like that after we had an "ah-ha" moment. Our friend and neighbor has just gone off to sea on the USS Nimitz for six months, which is no sea cruise, even though it sorta looks like one.

After a few days on the briny, the Commander e-mailed us a spreadsheet that was circulating on the ship. The spreadsheet (for some unfathomable reason called the Short Timers Clock) calculates the duration of the mission along with how much time has elapsed and how much remains. We looked at this and thought, "Why not wrap that up as a dashboard?"

We're sure you know that dashboards are a hot topic. Essentially a window into enterprise performance, dashboards are intended to chart anything and everything using a heady combination of Web servers, server-side scripts, browsers and rich Internet applications that rely on such technologies as AJAX, Flash or proprietary client-side run-time systems.

Building dashboards is as easy as the tools you have, and one of the easiest to work with is Crystal Xcelsius from Business Objects.

Quite some time ago (2003, actually), Xcelsius was first reviewed in the Network World Web Applications newsletter, and it has cropped up in NW a few more times over the years for one very good reason: There is nothing like it. Xcelsius is one of those products that is simply excellent.

Xcelsius takes the logic of a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and wraps it up in Adobe Flash so that the data can be manipulated through a graphical user interface complete with charts, progress bars, dials, gauges, knobs and so on.

So, with our experience with Xcelsius, the latest version of the product (Crystal Xcelsius Professional 4.5; $495 and worth every penny), and the challenge of producing a cool, all-singing, all-dancing version of the Short Timers Clock, we were all set. Little did we know that we were about to boldly go where apparently no Xclesius hacker has been before (Xcelsius told us it couldn't be done).

Our first problem occurred when we realized that the time data needed to be refreshed. In Excel the value of the formula =now() is evaluated only when the spreadsheet is recalculated. In Xcelsius the result of a formula apparently gets updated only if a value referenced by the formula gets updated (this may be some kind of cunning performance optimization). What this means is that the result of =now() won't change but =now()+B1-B1 will be updated if the value of cell B1 changes.

But how to regularly update the value of cell B1? Ah ha! Xcelsius provides a collection of Web access functions. One of these is an XML Data button component that can upload and download XML structured data. Moreover, it can do this either when you click on the button or set it to refresh at a regular interval.