Best solution for using EJBs from Excel

Question

We would like to give access to some of our EJBs from Excel. The goal is to give an API usable from VBA.

Our EJBs are mostly Stateless Session Beans that do simple CRUD operations with POJOs.

Some possible solutions:

• Exposing the EJBs as WebServices and create a VB/C# dll wrapping them,
• Using Corba to access the EJBs from C#,
• Creating a COM Library that uses Java to access the EJBs,

Pointers to frameworks for these solution or other ideas are welcome.

Answer 1

You could take a look at IIOP.NET, which addresses this issue.

Answer 2

If you have a fairly recent ejb container, the cheapest and easiest should be to expose your beans as web services and call it from VB/C#. This doesn't require any extra tool or library.

Answer 3

Back in the VB6/COM/DCOM times we used the suite J-Integra to accomblish this task. I have no experience with the .NET version though.

Answer 4

I highly recommend IKVM. It is a java byte code to .NET assembly compiler (i.e. JAR --> DLL) and I have used it to create live JMX links and listeners in an Excel automation server. It should not be difficult for you to create a .NET assembly of your EJB client stubs and supporting libraries.

//Nicholas

Answer 5

I work on an open source project called XLLoop - this framework allows you to expose POJO functions as Excel functions.

It consists of:

1. An Excel add-in (XLL), which communicates over TCP to:
2. A Java server/library, which invokes java methods.

You could embed this java function server in an EJB and have it deployed as part of your app server.

Answer 6

You could try Obba....