RadarSoft - VCL and ASP.NET controls for Analysis Services
When Microsoft bought Proclarity, there were much speculation in the news, blogs, forums etc about what it would it mean to other third party tools. There were some predictions that the number of client tools to Analysis Services will shrink. Yet, 6 months later, we see that the list of such tools is longer then ever, and new products keep coming to the market. One of such new products is RadarSoft, which just shipped Analysis Services enabled version in September 2006. RadarSoft is a company which developed HierCube - a proprietary OLAP engine and RadarCube - library of client UI components. One unique thing about RadarCube was that it was probably the only OLAP control for VCL on the market. While there are probably not as many Delphi programmers these days as there are C# or Java programmers, Delphi programmers are known for their strong (almost religious) attachment to the platform. Borland has always been a developer-friendly company. So Delphi developers who wanted to embed OLAP functionality into their applications could use RadarCube VCL control, but previously it could only connect to the HierCube OLAP engine. So these developers have been asking RadarSoft to provide connectivity to Analysis Services, and RadarSoft delivered. It released version of RadarCube.VCL which works with Analysis Services (both 2000 and 2005 versions, although 2005 is recommended). Here is a sample screenshot how the browsing of the AdventureWorks cube looks like
But RadarSoft didn't stop there. They rightfully realized, that the community of ASP.NET developers is much bigger then the community of Delphi developers. And that there is a great need in good ASP.NET control which can be hooked to the Analysis Services cube. So they released RadarCube ASP.NET control for Analysis Services too. It is modern AJAX based UI with multibrowser support (IE 5.5 and higher, FireFox and Opera too). It has support for AS2005 features such as KPIs and attribute hierarchies etc. It integrates with Dundas charting control in order to show charts. Below is the sample screenshot of what can be done with this control:
