FXApps

I love open data. Recently we had the idea to see if alderman were attending the legislative sessions, when getting into the town website we had the bad news that each session information was provided in a PDF or XLS file that should be downloaded. That was really bad and we thought that we should do something. Sessão means session, behind each session we had a link to the file that contains the session information... Our first goal was to download all the files so we could parse it later, a simple bash script solved that, but then we had the challenge to read all files and transform it to javascript so we could show it in a web page. Well, we thought: for PDF we use iText, for XLS we use JExcel. Issue solved? No. Read the file to text would require more work, specially with the JExcel API, that allow us to go thought the spreadsheet cells, read the text of each cell etc. But that was fine, that is the exciting parts about dealing with open data: hacking. We even used Strategy...