When I first posted about my DataBridge utility I mentioned the DataCollector, which was a Java-based framework for quickly building apps that interacted via web services with a third-party CRM services provider.

In this post I’ll introduce the DataCollector framework. For obvious proprietary reasons, this will be fairly generic, but I think the basic architecture is worth sharing. It’s a nice example of using factory classes.

Continue reading →

Last time I started the story of my DataBridge application — a Java-based tool for transferring and transforming tabular data, such as TAB, CSV, and XML files. It could also read from and write to ODBC tables.

The app itself was just a framework that implemented a basic IPO model to transfer data. The details were up to the Input, Process (in this case, Mapping), and Output, drivers loaded at run time.

Continue reading →