Where do we get the examples? I wrote them asking for the test samples! U/f their mail server bounced my message (or someone wanted me to think it did ;-) )
Anyhow the criticism was somewhat fair of 1.5.x in that we didn't preserve macros. As far as easy to use...well I couldn't get their blasted thing to do well...much of anything. No matter what path I sent it, it didn't like it so far as that license key thing (this would be truly fun to install in a server environment...doh ya think getting the license file out of the classpath would be too much to ask for humm?). Now with 1.8-dev+ we support not only preserving macros but Japanese and Russian seems to work nice (well I have to take other's words on that as anything with characters I can't read looks like Japanese to me ;-) ). They spit my words back at me as far as supporting Western European languages first, I just was honest about it ;-), something tells me they haven't decoded all the special fields that say "reserved for far east version of Excel". In truth POI's international language support will probably always be better due to the obvious opensource advantage in this area. How often do you think they get patches labeled "from Russia with love" (thanks Serge!)? One funny thing is their own benchmarks show POI is faster ;-) All in all I didn't make a big deal out of this as they are the underdog so to speak. We have them beat on pricepoint and featureset (from my understanding by those who were able to get it to work). Extentech was a barely functioning website when I started POI and from my judgment at the time the product was no where near suitable for my needs. POI breathed new life into ExtenXLS partially through our bad judgment (or is it sense of sport?) in linking them as an "alternative"... Why do you I say this? Understand how google works... Linking from Apache makes them show up way higher than they would otherwise... Hence they should write us a check ;-) My company, SuperLink Software offers the same level of commercial support for POI (only we're not trying to host your application for you, but I'm sure we could figure something out if someone really wanted us to) and by December we should have a new product based on POI called SOA Workbook which will be more expensive than POI but less expensive than ExtenXLS not to mention Actuate e-spreadsheet ;-). In addition to POI's featureset it will have improved formula support, macro calculation support and require 1/4 of the memory footprint of POI for large spreadsheets. The first three are through collaboration with a company in Germany producing a product called JSC, and the latter is the POI 3.0 memory model (it will make it into 3.0 as soon as 2.0 is released and any difficult features of 3.0 are complete, I thought about doing it for 2.0 but it IS significantly more painful to debug and would have a negative impact on the realization of the 2.0 featureset). Oh we'll also have "corporate" style documentation (no jokes ;-) ). So all in all POI's story versus ExtenXLS looks like ExtenXLS is for people who would like to reduce the amount of money in their bank account for the same thing. ;-) I think someone needs to send them a wakeup call. Its a service-based industry...licensing is dying as a business model. How's that? -Andy On Thu, 2002-10-10 at 12:46, Dennis Doubleday wrote: > http://www.extentech.com/products/ExtenXLS/docs/product_features.jsp > > Hey, Andy, any comment? I think you have a pretty easy-to-use API. :-) > Their examples don't look that different, either. > > > -- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > -- http://www.superlinksoftware.com - software solutions for business http://jakarta.apache.org/poi - Excel/Word/OLE 2 Compound Document in Java http://krysalis.sourceforge.net/centipede - the best build/project structure a guy/gal could have! - Make Ant simple on complex Projects! The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote. -Ambassador Kosh -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
