Hmm - and now that I've started digging into it, I see that this company has radically changed from what I knew of it. I had known it as a company which created software for designing and running reports from various data sources (whatever could feed it, honestly - excel, odbc, csv files, etc), which internally could be configured for more advanced usage using a language that had similarities to Visual Basic (it was OO long before VB, and geared for the reporting system, not general purpose usage). Before I left my employer who used it, they had just announced a Java-based system of "business objects" and some kind of tool to interact with data in an Excel-like manner (the tool essentially had all of the functionality of Excel at the time - including pivot tables), where changes would propagate thru the system. Plus interaction could only be done thru those objects, which were defined as "views" into the dataset.
So - after research this (just now!) - imagine my surprise at finding that this company now is named:
Apparently this started in 2004 (not long after I left my employer - and that it is Java-based also fits).
I'm not sure what is what with the company any longer? If I had to guess (probably wrongly), they spun off their Actuate reporting stuff and the other tools as open source (?), and are now concentrating on other things, possibly in the same vein?
Another company/product that I know about (though it's been over a decade since I last touched it) that attempted to fix this issue was Actuate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuate_Corporation
Hmm - and now that I've started digging into it, I see that this company has radically changed from what I knew of it. I had known it as a company which created software for designing and running reports from various data sources (whatever could feed it, honestly - excel, odbc, csv files, etc), which internally could be configured for more advanced usage using a language that had similarities to Visual Basic (it was OO long before VB, and geared for the reporting system, not general purpose usage). Before I left my employer who used it, they had just announced a Java-based system of "business objects" and some kind of tool to interact with data in an Excel-like manner (the tool essentially had all of the functionality of Excel at the time - including pivot tables), where changes would propagate thru the system. Plus interaction could only be done thru those objects, which were defined as "views" into the dataset.
So - after research this (just now!) - imagine my surprise at finding that this company now is named:
https://www.opentext.com/
...and they also did something called "BIRT" - which was open source and part of Eclipse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIRT_Project
Apparently this started in 2004 (not long after I left my employer - and that it is Java-based also fits).
I'm not sure what is what with the company any longer? If I had to guess (probably wrongly), they spun off their Actuate reporting stuff and the other tools as open source (?), and are now concentrating on other things, possibly in the same vein?
Weird. But very interesting.