Thanks, Mark! The thing that I think all the suggestions have in common is that they all try to leverage existing CLI type interfaces - which to me implies using that shell as my vehicle to achieve my goal. This is good on the one hand - using stuff that exists today - but it comes with whatever other stuff is in that shell that might be beyond my need.
While I don't plan to create a domain specific language around this, my goal is similar. I'm basically taking the ExcelAnt idea a step further in terms of laziness: I want to be able to test a sheet or workbook for compatibility, interactively. I think this is probably a step lazier than ExcelAnt because it requires even less work - I just fire up the shell and start testing; when I find a discrepancy I can drill into it right there. ExcelAnt is for re-useable testing. This shell will be a small set of commands to quickly establish compatibility (though the debugging/breakpoint idea isn't all that simple). Another requirement for me, and this was true of the ant tasks too, is that I want to be able to give this to an Excel developer (in my case these people aren't programmers, they're analysts) and with a 5 minute explanation get them up to speed. This is probably my biggest useability requirement: giving it to a non-technical, non-programmer and have it be useable. I am basically creating tooling that let's me and my team off load the work of validating that a spreadsheet is POI compatible to the spreadsheet developers. However, I also want a tool let's me drill into problems rather than what I have to do now, which is sort of manually walk thru the sheets looking for places where Excel and POI and disagree. I need to look more closely at the suggestions before I go off and writing something..... Jon ________________________________ From: Mark Fortner <[email protected]> To: POI Users List <[email protected]> Sent: Sun, May 15, 2011 2:06:12 PM Subject: Re: interactive shell for Excel/POI A couple of other alternatives occurred to me: 1. Java shipped with a scripting shell in 1.5. The default language is JavaScript, and the tool is called jrunscript. It can also be used with other scripting languages. You can find a complete list of the supported languages at http://scripting.dev.java.net 2. Groovy has it's own interactive shell, and you can use the @Grab annotation (aka Grape) to load any library. I typically use this to load Maven-based libraries. You can find out more information about these technologies here: - http://groovy.codehaus.org/Groovy+Shell - http://groovy.codehaus.org/Grape Hope this helps, Mark On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 12:54 PM, Jon Svede <[email protected]> wrote: > Sorry for the late reply, I read this last week and have been thinking about it. > > I don't know if either of those would address my desire. I hadn't heard of > Rhino, I'll have to look at it in detail. At a quick glance it looks pretty > programmer oriented and I wanted to get a little further away from what looks > like actual code (though I think one could say that any CLI is pretty programmer > oriented). > > Not sure how I would use the Ruby extension, especially one that isn't in the > API already(is that in the works? I haven't seen any posts on that recently). > > Thanks, > > Jon > > > > ________________________________ > From: Nick Burch <[email protected]> > To: POI Users List <[email protected]> > Sent: Fri, May 6, 2011 10:17:06 PM > Subject: Re: interactive shell for Excel/POI > > On Fri, 6 May 2011, Jon Svede wrote: >> Is there a tool that will allow you to interact with a spreadsheet from a >>shell? > > Two options spring to mind. One is using javascript (via Rhino). The other is > the Ruby extension (not the current one, but the one that someone was talking of > contributing a few weeks back). Do either of those work for you? > > Nick > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] > For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
