Data streams in spreadsheets with reactive extensions
Luc Willems · Research Repository (Delft University of Technology) · 2016
The amount of collected data increases exponentially and this exponential growth comes with a demand to analyze big volumes of data and to process the data fast and in real time. Business analysts have the expertise in the domain of the desired stream processing applications, but often lack the technical skills to create these kind of applications. Advanced software engineering skills are required in the development of these applications. This thesis aims to make real time stream processing available for the millions of spreadsheets users around the world. The thesis presents a novel spreadsheet model, that turns a spreadsheet into an effective integrated development environment for stream processing. The spreadsheet model is built upon the reactive extensions framework, a library for asynchronous programming with push based data streams. The spreadsheet model is implemented both as add-in for Microsoft Excel and as underlying part of a newly created spreadsheet application that was written in Scala.