Hi Oliver, > do you think it make sense to start an open source project, which addresses > this requirements? Similar to jxls for Excel, I think this would be also a good approach for Word. (I haven't searched for alternative implementations.)
> The most important requirement was, that the end-user itself can easily > create and modify the templates in MS Word without programming skills. Just out of curiosity, what was your use case? I assume this [easily create and modify] is suitable for (one-)table like data structures. But for handling nested structures/lists, user need to have basic knowledge of list processing. As a developer, I would prefer to have something like a scripting language to access my data - preferably with calling custom functions. I have to admit, that I'm a bit allergic to the expression "without programming skills", as this lead to some bad management decisions in my $dayjob. > And if so, are there developers, which are interested in helping us starting > such a project? For POI issues, I'm sure we can help you - preferably for XWPF as the HWPF might need some (much more) work. Apart of POI issues - speaking for myself - I'm not really interested, as I hardly use Word (and programmatically not at all) and there are still so many issues with X/HSLF and X/HSSF I have on my todo list. > Could Apache POI be a place to start such a project as subproject? I think you are better off, creating a top level project first - of course we can link to that project from the project pages. A subproject would probably go to the contrib directory which hasn't got much attention. One thing I don't like about new bigger features in POI is the release stability *), i.e. I often come to the point where I'd like to refactor several methods but instead of removing the methods, I deprecate them and introduce a bunch of others ... Furthermore for a new project, you might like to be flexible and not be bound to a certain library dependency/decision. Best wishes, Andi *) doesn't apply to contrib projects --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
