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I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

Why Spring Belongs In Your Data Stream (From Edge to Multi Cloud) by Fabrizio Marini @ Spring I/O 23

Revisiting Popular Posts: Spring Batch Resources & Maven Failsafe With Spring Boot

Two of the most popular posts on this blog cover resources for Spring Batch and how to use Maven Failsafe with Spring Boot: Spring Batch Resources: Batch Processing, ETL And Data Conversion Using Maven Failsafe With Spring Boot While doing some regular blog housekeeping, I recently revised those articles and fixed a few broken links. If you're interested in these technologies and frameworks, you might want to check those articles out.

Sunday October 24th, 2021 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

PivotHelper: Generate Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts from CSV and Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet Files

Somewhat recently, I regularly had to generate Pivot tables and corresponding charts from datasets provided as both CSV and Microsoft Excel files. Now, with its data source and pivot table tools Microsoft Excel usually lends itself to that sort of task. However, to completely automate this task VBA macros are required. Those too work quite nicely if one overcomes the initial aversion of working with Microsoft's not exactly well-designed and usable IDE for VBA macros (Excel's own macro recording feature is quite ...

Sunday May 5th, 2019 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Modern SQL by Markus Winand

Last year, I attended an event during which SQL trainer and consultant Markus Winand gave an aptly titled talk on Modern SQL: Evolution of a dinosaur (the linked video is not from that event but it shows the same talk given at another event). Markus runs a website called Modern SQL, which provides an impressive range of SQL tips, best practices, descriptions of both highly useful and lesser known SQL features and comparisons between the various relational database management systems (RDBMS) available ...

Sunday March 3rd, 2019 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Dan Bricklin – Inventor of the Electronic Spreadsheet

Today startup entrepreneurs are celebrated for disrupting industries and changing the world. Marc Andreessen is famously quoted with the statement "Software is eating the world!". Back in the days when software was nothing but a nascent industry, Dan Bricklin both changed the world with software, disrupted not one industry but several at the same time and in fact almost single-handedly created the industry of small business software. His name nowadays isn't exactly well known as is the software he created. The new ...

Sunday March 19th, 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Exporting table data in web applications as CSV or Excel files

In business applications being able to export data to Microsoft Excel is a very common requirement. In most business environments Excel is the go-to tool for business analytics and quick-and-easy data processing. Hence, being able to communicate with Excel is an essential feature for most kinds of business software. The usual approach for meeting that requirement is generating a CSV file on the server. However, while simple this approach can come with a few downsides: While CSV is a useful, accessible plain text ...

Sunday January 29th, 2017 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

Spring Batch Resources: Batch Processing, ETL And Data Conversion

ETL (extract, transform, load) processes, data processing, exporting data from one business system (ERP, CRM, accounting etc.) and importing it into another are common requirements in enterprise IT. So much so that the ability to export and import data often is the key feature of enterprise software. Spring Batch is a toolkit in the context of the widely used Spring framework that allows you to define and run batch jobs and data processing pipelines. Spring Batch provides features such as: data export / ...

Sunday December 25th, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Björn Wilmsmann