Ive been reading about seaside and like the sound of it but i cant see an easy way for handling data files, primarily importing Excel. Of course csv files would be more straight forward, but are there any ways to import the various Excel formats (xls,xlsx) without writing your own file parsing routines?
I've heard that the need to open Excel files would be a good reason to choose a windows based system like .NET, what do you guys think?
There are various Smalltalk implementation that support Seaside and that have an excellent integration into the Windows platform: Dolphin Smalltalk, VA Smalltalk, and Cincom Smalltalk. I assume that it is possible to call Excel with any of these.
There are various command line tools available that you could call to convert an XLS file to something you can easily parse (like CSV).
However, I think the most elegant solution (also from an end-user perspective) is the one of Magic/Replace.