Obba

Platform Independent

for Excel, OpenOffice, LibreOffice and NeoOffice.

Obba provides a bridge between spreadsheets and Java classes. With Obba, you can use spreadsheets as GUIs for your Java libraries; turning your Java library to platform independent spreadsheet add-ins. Compatible with Excel/Windows, OpenOffice/Win/Mac/Linux, LibreOffice/Win/Mac/Linux, NeoOffice/Mac.

Its main features are:

• Stateful access to almost all objects and methods running in a Java virtual machine via a fixed set of spread sheet functions.
• Client/server support: The Java virtual machine providing the add-in may run on the same computer or a remote computer - without any change to the spreadsheet.
• Loading of arbitrary jar or class files at runtime through a spreadsheet function.
• Instantiation of Java objects, storing the object reference under a given object label.
• Invocation of methods on objects referenced by their object handle, storing the handle to the result under a given object label.
• Asynchronous method invocation and tools for synchronization, turning your spreadsheet into a multi-threaded calculation tool.
• Allows arbitrary number of arguments for constructors or methods (avoids the limitation of the number of arguments for Excel worksheet functions).
• Serialization and de-serialization (save Serializable objects to a file, restore them any time later).
• All this through spreadsheet functions, without any additional line of code (no VBA needed, no additional Java code needed).

For tutorials see Obba tutorial. In one of the tutorials you create a Java class and a spreadsheet to fetch Stock quotes from finance.yahoo.com.

For a more detailed introduction see Obba documentation and Obba home page.

Version 3 of Obba is a major revision and brings support for running the Java virtual machine references in the spreadsheet on a different machine.

NOTE: YOU NEED TO REMOVE OBBA 2.x MANUALLY AND RESTART OO PRIOR INSTALLATION OF OBBA 3.x.