News

Panscopic drinks-in Liquid Data

• By Jack Vaughan
• September 4, 2003

A lot of analytical and reporting activity involves Excel -- not surprisingly, then, a lot of the activity revolves around Microsoft platforms. But the Java platform has many adherents, and reporting advances are happening in that space as well. In fact, with the advent of XML, Java users have new means to deal with data.

A case in point comes from start-up Panscopic, a maker of XQuery- and XPath-based self-serve reporting software for the Java platform. Last month, the company announced that it had integrated its software with BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic 8.1 and BEA WebLogic Portal 8.1. The pack marks one of the early solutions for visually presenting XML data.

"BEA Liquid Data gives us better access to XML. It can join XML data with relational sources," said Al Campa, Panscopic president and CEO. "Using XPath, we can bring that stream into our environment and then eventually to Excel."

The combination of Panscopic and BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic ensures that disparate data sources can be accessed in real-time for self-reporting and analytics, and with less need for costly back-end integration or data warehouse technologies, claims Campa. He said the Panscopic Application V2.3 runs on Tomcat servers, too.

"It's hard to access XML," said Campa. "Once you have, it is difficult to preserve the structure; and that is what makes [the data] interesting. Liquid Data brings us the structure and the [necessary] transformative engine."

Earlier in the summer, the company announced its initial integration with Liquid Data, as well as its integration with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Data sources supported include XML, EJBs and RDBs. A wizard-based approach is said to enable IT to maintain control over queries, and to offload report formatting and layout tasks to end users.