Re: Import from Excel — once more, with feeling. :-) (Apache POI)

On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 5:20 PM, Bastiaan Olij <bastiaan@basenlily.me>
wrote:

> Rob,
>
> The issue we run into at our Mac clients is that Apple has done a bang
> good job making people afraid of JAVA. With the Studio 6 installation
> using JAVA and popping up a nice message from Apple along the lines of
> “we’ve removed JAVA from the OS because it’s as leaky as a basket case”
> (and yes I’m paraphrasing) there isn’t a whole lot of good will with our
> clients when you suggest installing a JAVA client anyway.
> Even if by now in Studio 8 it can use the latest 64bit version of JAVA,
> the scare tactic has been enough for Mac users to say “Client says no”
> to anything that even smells of JAVA.
>

I have Java installed on my Mac and yet, I still get annoying dialogs about
Java which I just ignore. I can’t imagine end users putting up with that
crap.

> We removed JAVA support from our Studio installations a long ago and I’m
> pretty happy that Omnis is moving away from using JAVA as a core
> technology and instead making more use of Python.
>

Really? How does Omnis make use of Python at all?

So while I can’t say whether Apache’s solution is any good or not, I did
> want to give a note of warning that you’re clients might not be thrilled
> when asked to deploy JAVA on their clients if they are mac based.
>
> Note that python seems to have libraries for writing to xls as well:
> www.python-excel.org/
> And with Python 2.7 coming hardwired into Mac OS and being part of the
> JobBag installation on Windows those should be options as well.
> Admittedly I haven’t tried them, I might actually give them a run for
> their money later in the week.

I have two comments about using Python. First, never use the globally
installed Python. Use some sort of virtualenv to isolate the site-packages
for your project from the global site-packages. I use virtualenv and
virtualenwrapper < virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html> to create
and manage Python projects. That’s only good for OS X or Linux. If I had to
support Windows, too, I would use pipenv < pipenv.readthedocs.io/en/latest/> in combination with pyenv < github.com/pyenv/pyenv>. The former isolates modules for your
project. The latter enables you to switch between different versions of
Python quickly.

Second, use Python 3.6 or better. Python 3.6 makes asynchronous and
parallel programming as simple as it can get and for fans of static typing,
you now have the option of specifying types for variables if you want.
Also, the end-of-life for Python 2.7 is 2020, which is not so distant in
the future that you should be starting a new project with it.

Regards,

Clifford Ilkay

+1 647-778-8696
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