Newbie biting off more than he can chew, can you lend some molars?

[dwelden at my-deja.com]

In article <8tmj31020gp at news1.newsguy.com>,
  "Alex Martelli" <aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote:
> <dwelden at my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:8tkkht$40j$1 at nnrp1.deja.com...
>     [snip]
> > The module is a wrapper for a collection of dll's that interface
with
> > the Hyperion Essbase OLAP Server. The OS for which I am interested
is
> > Windows NT, but it also works with AIX, Sun, etc. The module can be
>
> I suspect your best bet is to interface to Hyperion Essbase through
> COM (aka ActiveX), a technology which apparently they also support
(as,
> on NT, one would have to be crazy NOT to support:-).  Python, with
> Mark Hammond's win32all extensions, works very well with most COM
> servers (if custom, non-standard, non-automation interfaces are to be
> handle, a little bit of C++ level work to extend the pythoncom module
> may be needed, but that hardly ever happens, in my experience of COM
> servers... functionality is virtually-always exposed through 'dual'
> interfaces, which Python is good at, and accompanied by type
libraries,
> which can be analyzed by the makepy auxiliary script to enhance the
> interfacing 'depth'.
>
> One specific possibility is using ADO, the application-oriented part
> of Microsoft's Universal-Data-Access architecture (the lower-level
> part of which is OleDb); one thing ADO is particularly touted as good
> for (I have no experience in that, but it does seem to make sense)
> is interfacing to OLAP servers, and I've heard Hyperion Essbase given
> as a specific example in this context.  Python, of course, is good
> at driving ADO (ADO, after all, being nothing but a typical COM
> object model, exposed through automation-compliant dual interfaces).
>
> (For platform-independence one might want to look into whether
> Hyperion Essbase can be accessed via CORBA -- Python is quite
> good at talking Corba, too -- and only as a last-ditch would one
> consider porting C-level code intended to interface to Perl, IMHO;
> it's probably easier to wrap some C-level interface via SWIG...).
>
> Alex
>
>

Hyperion does have an ActiveX object library for which they charge $$$.
Not interested in going that route. ADO/OLEDB would be great, but
Essbase does not support it|it does not support Essbase AFAIK.

SWIG appears to be a viable option as I mentioned in my original post,
but I don't know how to get started with that (any pointers?).


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