ZK Spreadsheet Essentials 3/Introduction

Overview

ZK Spreadsheet is an AJAX component that delivers Excel-like experience for you Java web application.

Being able to import and export Excel files are just the minimum. Unlike other on-line spreadsheet such as Google Docs or Office 2010 online suite, you can integrate ZK Spreadsheet with your enterprise back-end systems seamlessly and create collaborative and dynamic enterprise applications at minimal cost. You can call versatile Java APIs to control and configure the ZK Spreadsheet component(s). You can register event listeners so an action can be automatically triggered if any specified cell, range, or name changes. You can make cells reference to the backend Java beans, so any changes on the backend data can automatically reflect on ZK Spreadsheet. You can create your own customized formulas in Java and use them in the spreadsheet like other built-in formulas. You can even create by yourselves an online spreadsheet service with ZK Spreadsheet component.

ZK Spreadsheet is an extensible, customizable, and integrable Java AJAX web spreadsheet solution, with both built-in browser AJAX user interface and back-end server side Excel-like data and logic. No ActiveX or other plug-ins are required.

Architecture

ZK Spreadsheet component consist of three major parts -- the UI, the book data model, and the formula evaluation engine. The UI is a grid like widget that you can in-place edit the content of each cell. The data model stores the actual spreadsheet data. The formula evaluation engine is responsible for formula parsing and calculations.

Difference from 2.5.0

In 3.0.0, we simplify Spreadsheet APIs for accessing books, sheets, and cells, e.g. Book, and Range. They are all under org.zkoss.zss.api.* and we encourage you to use them.

The Next

Maybe you would like to take a look at Spreadsheet demo or get Spreadsheet running at your local site and configure as you want.

Example Source Code

The complete source code of this book can be accessed from [http:// ].