Sorry for the repost, I realized that I'd incorrectly labeled the post a reply (re:) and thought some folks may have not seen it because of that. A quick update, POI is the #10 project on sourceforge this morning.
Hi, I'm writing, at the recommendation of Stefano Mazzocchi, in hopes of drawing discussion and perhaps later a vote on the creation of a new Jakarta subproject based on the POI project (http://poi.sourceforge.net & http://sourcefoge.net/projects/poi). The POI project consists of an API for reading and writing Microsoft's OLE2 Compound Document Format, the format used in Microsoft Office for Word and Excel documents, as well as ports of file formats based on it. Currently the project is composed into the following parts: POIFS - the pure java port of OLE 2 Compound Document format and the APIs for manipulating it. HSSF - the pure java port of Microsoft's Excel 97 File format (BIFF8) which is shared by all newer version of Excel as well. HSSFSerializer - Cocoon2 Serializer for HSSF. It uses the same XML tag language as Gnumeric. [this will be donated and hosted in Cocoon] HSSFGenerator - commencing. [this will be part of Cocoon as well] HDF - commencing. A pure java port of Microsoft's Word 97 File Format which is shared by newer versions of Word as well. The POI project has been in development for just over 6 months. The POI project has gained a reasonably large user base and currently has four listed developers and a few occasional contributers. On any given day it makes the front page on Sourceforge's most active projects. The POI project will attract a larger development community once the Word port begins. However, the project admins (myself and Marc) will continue to develop it until pried from our cold dead fingertips regardless of anything. We released a beta over the holidays and our 1.0 release yesterday. We started the project in order to provide the ability for Cocoon to present information directly in Office formats and wanted to donate it to Cocoon directly, but the potential benefits of POI encompass those of Cocoon or xml.apache.org and we believe that many Jakarta subprojects could potentially benefit from POI and it makes good "business sense" for Apache as a whole. Possible collaboration scenarios are Lucene indexing large quantities of data in .doc and .xls files, Slide doing content management in a corporate environment that necessitates DOC and XLS support, Turbine doing content delivery in DOC XLS and content editing in DOC, XLS). >From a personal standpoint, its the most fun thing I've worked on in a great while. Microsoft creates great brain teasers! While I don't think the project will ever be "finished" (there will always be a minor enhancement or detail to be worked out), it is already very useful. Thoughts? Happy New Year, -Andy -- www.sourceforge.net/projects/poi - port of Excel format to java The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote. -Ambassador Kosh -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
