Proposal for "POI" - A Jakarta Subproject version 1.0 - 17 Jan 2002
(0) rationale The POI project seeks to provide pure Java APIs for reading, creating and manipulating files written in formats based on Microsoft OLE 2 Compound Document Format. The POI project has already successfully created a Pure Java OLE 2 Compound Document Format library (POIFS) and a port of the Microsoft Excel '97(-2002) file format (aka XLS, BIFF8) and tools for serializing XML in these formats (which will be hosted as part of Cocoon 2). The POI project user community is growing leaps and bounds in usage as evidenced by its position as one of the most active projects on SourceForge and the 2,290 people who have downloaded it so far this month. The POI project currently has two active developers. The development community might be small but is fanatically committed (and growing rather quickly). It is likely that the upcoming port of the Microsoft Word 97 File format will increase the size of the development community, not to mention the user community. The documentation is comprehensive and includes full documentation on the previously undocumented (or at least incompletely documented) Microsoft OLE 2 Compound Document Format. There are also HOW-TO documents that illustrate use cases and examples. Lastly, The project founders have agreed to collaborate with a developer at the OpenOffice.org project on the Excel File Format Documentation. Many Jakarta projects could potentially take advantage of POI and its use in Jakarta will likely further seed the POI developer community. POI is a unique project in the Java world. Up until now there have been no successful free attempts to provide read/write access to OLE 2 CDF or MS Excel (97+) file formats. POI coupled with other Jakarta technologies could produce some highly useful offspring. A few specific examples might be Office Document indexing for Lucene, Velocity generating Excel and Word document presentations, Office document management capabilities for Slide as well as content delivery and editing in Turbine. POI would make it possible to use Jakarta and XML-Apache projects in many cases where currently a proprietary solution is currently required. (1) scope of the subproject The subproject shall create and maintain packages written in the Java language, intended for use in generating and reading files in formats based on the OLE 2 Compound Document Format. (2) identify the initial source from which the subproject is to be populated The initial packages would be based on existing POI codebase currently located at SourceForge: http://poi.sourceforge.net (3) identify the Jakarta resources to be created (3.1) mailing list(s) poi-user poi-dev (3.2) CVS repositories jakarta-poi (3.3) Bugzilla program - poi components - Web site, POIFS, HSSF, HDF (3.4) Jyve FAQ (when available) poi-general poi-poifs poi-hssf poi-hdf (4) identify the initial set of committers Andrew Oliver Marcus Johnson (5) identify apache sponsoring individual Stefano Mazzocchi -- www.superlinksoftware.com www.sourceforge.net/projects/poi - port of Excel format to java http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/bugParade/bugs/4487555.html - fix java generics! The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote. -Ambassador Kosh
