A Methodology of Employing Spreadsheet Software as a Tool for Integrating Web Services

Abstract

Abstract-Web services are client and server applications that communicate over hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) of the world wide web's (WWW).Web services are built around the Web browser standards and can be used by any browser on any platform. However, web browsers themselves lack the ability to analyst and process web data offline as users need. In order to perform data analysis, users have to output data from web sites in CSV or XML format, and have spreadsheet software (such as Microsoft Excel, etc.) imported the data. This inconvenient and time-consuming task is a bottle neck in analyzing data of web applications. The objective of this paperis to present a methodology that employs Excel as a toolfor web serviceintegration and offline data processing. Furthermore, this paper presents the technical feature comparison between webbrowsers and Excel in aspect of web application client. Based on this methodology, we have developed an Excel-based online accommodation search program thatintegrates web services of Google Map and Rakuten Travel which is the biggest accommodation booking web site of Japan.