Software for handling online WorWin/Excel apps?

[Alex Martelli]

"Q" <samwun at yahoo.com> wrote in message news:399E73DB.CD2FD761 at yahoo.com...
> Hi,
>
> Is there any way I can handle online WinWord and Excel file remotely?
> I want to have server one copy of the WinWord/Excel application, and
> other user/clients can use it remotely thru the internet. Apart from
> using Java, what else I can use to accomplish that?

With DCOM, you can instantiate a COM object that lives on another
machine (if you have the relevant permissions, of course).  Word
and Excel documents expose a COM-object interface; therefore, you
can, if you want, instantiate them remotely through DCOM.

Running DCOM over the Internet is something else, though -- both
from a POV of security, and performance, you're likely to be
pretty heavily disappointed.  SOAP, or other XML-over-HTTP approach,
is likely to prove more scalable/well-performing, but it takes
some manual setting-up.

If you're running Microsoft IIS on your server, you might let
an ASP (or a Visual Basic 'Web App', etc) front-end for your
COM objects that you want to expose, forwarding to your actual
COM objects (the Word or Excel documents) whatever methods or
properties you want to publically expose.

Similarly, if you're running ZOPE on your server, you might
use it to 'publish' Python objects which, in turn, use win32com
to forward methods/properties to the actual COM objects.

These approaches, and other similar ones, use pure HTTP for
the part that runs on the Internet, and COM only locally to
the server -- probably the optimal setup.  Depending on what
you do already have on your server machine, it should also
be quite a bit easier to configure.

Depending on what you do need to do with your documents,
exposing their data with UDA (ADO/OleDb) is another alternative
that requires little setup work on your part; clients would
have to be 'data-aware', aka 'data-enabled' components, and
you may be able (with MSDAC 2.1 or later -- surely with 2.5)
to expose this as XML, which may in turn let you write (or
tweak/use) custom clients accordingly.  I have no real data
about the scalability of this, though -- just guesses (it should
be on a par with what SOAP will eventually give you).


Alex