Hi all, ** On Formulas **
I've decided to spearhead the formula effort. More than one person has offered to help, but mostly a "I have pieces of this code that may or may not have anything to do with Formulas"...(Sometimes without even reference to where the sources are)... If anyone thinks this is directly at them, its not...this is like the 3rd most common HSSF-related email I get. So in case there was any doubt in your mind: WE WANT HELP and WE WANT CODE. But we can't evaluate every piece of code everyone has every written to figure out if it might fit or it will never get done. Dig in and submit patches. We'll apply them. Its truly really that simple. So, I've outlined the general approach I'm planning in an earlier email (with slight modifications as I think through it). I'll be documenting this as I validate it (write prototype code and "tracer code"). I won't be using javacc because I'm not sure it is very useful for this purpose (we're not evaluating expressions, we're transforming one formula format to another), as outlined my approach will be a modified version of what we do for records. If anyone is game, pitch in. (I anticipate you'll come near the end when I leave out as unimportant your most used features but there's always a first ;-) ). ** On Website ** The site is now generating and uploading from cron scripts on my machine. This is far more elegant than the previous storing in CVS.. ** On Nightly Builds ** I think its apparent that we've been struggling for the past couple months. Mostly due to shifts in contributers. We've taken on new folks ( a good thing but it causes some overhead) and lost large time slices of folks who we had a lot more of in the past. I think the second biggest cause of this has been the somewhat ridiculous issues with the website and inability to post builds. The rhythm we had before we moved to jakarta has been lacking. Frequent builds are the heartbeat of a project. So my next project is to get nightly builds running regularly. Look for this sometime in the coming week. Glen has graciously agreed to take over as release/build master so he'll be ensuring that our blessed development builds and production releases are ready for business. ** On Rich Text ** So the two things that are most seriously missing at the moment are Formulas and Rich Text. I must say the SSTRecord is the most complicated piece of code in HSSF. Its kinda dirty and is the work of me and Marc hacking until we got it right. I'd love to see something more elegant, but how to do it is beyond me! (the SSTRecord is nasty and way overcomplicated and the code will always reflect that to some degree). That being said its a pretty complete and thoroughly tested piece of code, except it lacks support for Rich Text. From what I've read this looks like a pretty easy thing to add, the hard part will be keeping the SSTRecord thoroughly tested (Because believe me...if you miss something here you'll find out after the next release for sure ;-) ). I'll bet any money the next release of Actuate e-spreadsheet rips that code off...because at least as of their last release, they didn't have it!! Someone needs to take this up. This would be a fine place for someone who wanted to get involved to start. If not, I'll get to it after formulas. (but it really isn't tooooo hard trust me -- and it doesn't require a lot of knowledge, just an eye for detail). ** On 1.5 ** As far as the 1.5 release. The biggest thing that needs to be done is people need to bang on the build. Once we're happy that the build works and we put out a dev release or two with no serious issues (other than missing features), we'll go to the press with 1.5. ** On HSSF Serializer ** If you haven't taken a look at the HSSF Serializer over at the Cocoon project (xml.apache.org/cocoon) recently do so. I've submitted a number of patches which Nicola Ken has been dutifully applying rather quickly. These include support for Formats, more Font support and the new gnumeric file format, more than one example, documentation and the likes. A few of these have not quite yet made it into cocoon, but I'm confident they will in the next couple of days. ** Project Health ** I think we're well on our way to being on track. The project is still very healthy and continues to succeed. Once the formula effort is under way again and the nightly builds start coming in I've no doubt things will speed up. So the Formula effort officially begins tonight. I've got some work queued to this effect but you won't see them until Tuesday or so because I've got a JUG meeting tomorrow and I'm out of gas tonight. This coming weekend will be light for me because the in-laws are in town, but watch for incoming commits. *** week at a glance *** upgraded to new version of Centipede more graphing records (low level support) site now regenerates every 2 hours automatically documentation changes and updates preparations for 1.5 "And thats all I have to say about that" -Andy -- http://www.superlinksoftware.com http://jakarta.apache.org/poi - port of Excel/Word/OLE 2 Compound Document 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
