Excel pivot table in a web page

Question

This is probably a closable question, but really I think Stackoverflow is the best source where a practical answer can be found.

I'm working on a web page showing a pivot table. My solution is based on pure jQuery+html. Works pretty nice till now although some css work is still needed. Anyway my project leader is asking me to try to host the excel pivot table connecting to analisys services as an object into the browser. I don't like too much that solution, but I need to have some more points than just saying is an out of date architecture. The first point that come to me is that it only works in IE, but unfortunately the end customer is not just happy with that but also requiring IE. Another interesting point is that the protocol who that funny beast would probably use to communicate with the server is something not really HTTP, just to make firewall happy. End customer ( yes, the one who says IE is a requirement ) would eventually want to see the app working on IPad too, even if the project seems to stand sometime in developement, I doubt this time would be enough to Apple to properly port the ActiveX object in Safari.

What about? Are moi reason pointless, any more reason you see?

Answer 1

Enterprise decisions are driven by data and infrastructure, not code.

• If all your customer's data is stored in Analysis services, then all your JQuery+CSS wizardry doesn't matter if they're not able to pivot the data that they want

• The custom protocol of Analysis Services is designed to pivot billions of records, your JQuery/CSS may not be that scalable yet

• Most enterprises have only IE6/7 infrastructure, they don't even have Firefox, let alone Chrome. They want you to support IE rather than upgrading every desktop

• Customers who stress for IE compatibility hardly get around to supporting iPads in their infrastructure. Think Agile. Worry about things when they come, and don't waste effort on skeptical/fictional things. My favorite quote here as a programmer is:

  We design architecture and frameworks which support a thousand future possibilities. The customer somehow manages to come up with the thousand-and-oneth thing that we never designed for. Surely, they must be cleverer than us?

So you need to have an open mind on what you've been asked to do.

I'm sorry if this post doesn't directly answer your question. But I want to leave it this way.