All,
I have taken a new job with a company called SoftArtisans (http://www.softartisans.com). They develop OfficeWriter, a Java/.NET product for designing and delivering reports in Excel and Word (http://officewriter.softartisans.com/officewriter-240.aspx). So in a nutshell, I will be continuing to work on HWPF but it will be integrated with SoftArtisans OfficeWriter product line and it will be a commercial, for-sale, non-opensource product. They have also licensed the file formats from Microsoft. So this means I will *never* be able to contribute to HWPF development again. The contributions that I have already made to POI will always be a part of Apache and I hope that you find them useful. An article that Avik and I wrote will be appearing in the August issue of Java Developer's Journal and it covers the capabilities of the existing codebase of HWPF in CVS. It is very important to mention that SoftArtisans is committed to the Java community. They support me continuing to work on open source projects that do not directly compete with their commercial products. I am looking forward to following other interests in the java open source community that I haven't had the opportunity to participate in while working on HWPF on my own time. There are many of you that have expressed an interest in HWPF over the years, I hope you will be interested in paying for a rock-solid java/.NET Word library that will support ALL of the features of the file format. At the present time, SoftArtisans offers an impressive reporting product that preserves all of the features of Word and Excel. Anyway, its been great working with all of you. My new email address will be (ryana at softartisans dot com). Look me up sometime. Btw, I no longer plan on answering any questions about HWPF unless you are a SoftArtisans customer. Cheers, -Ryan
