On 7/23/03 3:49 PM, "Ryan Ackley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> What I had in mind when Andy came up with the > idea was a central community for all libraries that read and\or write > file formats. Kind of like http://wotsit.org on crack. So if someone had a > requirement to read/write some format they could just go to > formats.apache.org and see if a library was available. If they couldn't find > it we would have a whole community available to help them write their own. > Exactly! Of course we're not very helpful for people who don�t want to share code. This is an open source community, not slave labor ;-) > At work, one of my niches is file formats. I am a programmer on a document > management/workflow system. We always get new file formats that need their > text indexed for searching. Right now I have to go scour the web, > sourceforge, groups, and > try to find a) libraries or b) specs to program myself. Well it has happened > at least once where I have written my own when there was something else out > there already just because I didn't stumble across it (i.e. Excel). From my > experience there are hardly any open source java APIs for reading file > formats other than the big three: Word, Excel, PDF. For example, right now > at work, I am writing java code to read text from a DWG file (AutoCAD) based > on the spec at http://www.opendwg.org. > That�s a cool idea, specs and doco as part of the project even when we don't have a lib. We'll of course have to be careful that its all legit, but hey...thats with anything ... (I smell wiki pages) > I have a vision of a community of programmers frolicking through fields of > Hex dumps > and hard to understand format specs :-) I think one day it could be as > important to the OS community as the Apache webserver. It would not only > create a much needed community for fellow file format hackers to rally to, > but also a one stop shop for file format APIs. > > btw, what is CDF? Common Document Format. The idea is 1 API, 1 XML format that targets Ooo, Word, Lotus, Whatever. So in your Document management system you'd work with one file format.. Someone says "okay give me that in word" you transform CDF to Word and they edit it, upload it and you transform it back to CDF and store the deltas. (Just one use case)... Robert was referring back to an earlier email in the "I have an idea" thread. -andy > > Ryan > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- Andrew C. Oliver http://www.superlinksoftware.com/poi.jsp Custom enhancements and Commercial Implementation for Jakarta POI http://jakarta.apache.org/poi For Java and Excel, Got POI? --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
