On Thu, 30 Apr 2015, Allison, Timothy B. wrote:
We see advantages:
1) "It just makes sense" to have one centralized MSOffice parsing library
2) Increasing public awareness of each other's projects
3) sparking more cross-project, well, inner-project, collaboration among
the POI and Jackcess developers.
All of these make sense to me!
Some potential disadvantages:
1) From a use standpoint, current users of Jackcess would have to
migrate their code (if we changed the namespace)
Whether the code came to POI, or into the incubator, the namespace would
need to chance either way. However, it should be possible to produce a
compatibility jar with @deprecated classes extending from the renamed
ones, to minimise the pain for users, either semi-manually, or possibly
via some sort of dynamic class generation / invoking wizardry.
2) We'd have to redesign the maven build process to ant for Jackcess
(not hard, I know).
Not necessarily. POI already has a few maven bits in the build, which ant
calls out to. No reason why Jackcess couldn't be another
(At some point, we may find ourselves needing to move from Ant to Maven +
quite a few custom maven plugins, but for now a hybrid approach works well
for letting us do some nifty but very complex stuff in Ant for the build,
whilst giving Maven poms for use in Maven land)
3) From an integration standpoint, Jackcess doesn't rely on POI at all
so there would be no immediate decrease in source code/maintainability;
we might find some areas, but we'd have to find them.
There's probably some utils we could share, but initially I'd expect the
integration would be more user / committer than code
4) Further, Jackcess would be tied to POI's release schedule.
Maybe, maybe not. As an example, the Tomcat project has distributions of
Tomcat, Tomcat Connections, Tomcat Native Connector and Taglibs, all on
their own independent release cycles and packaging.
We'd probably just need to see how the communities gell'd/not, and decide
from that
In short, we'd break Jackcess for its users, add work for Jackcess and
POI developers, and then have no immediate payoff from cleaner/less code
or performance or anything else.
However, it'd gain wider use, and have a wider pool of potential
developers
As it stands, I fear that if you took a Jackcess proposal to the Apache
Incubator with only one active developer, it would struggle. It could be
worth checking with the experts though, on the [email protected] list,
to see what they suggest based on their past experiences
Nick
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