I'm sure there are probably technical reasons for the structure, but from someone that's green to the java world, less jars would make sense to me. But have a few options based on application, not file type. poi-common.jar, poi-excel.jar, poi-word.jar, poi-powerpoint.jar. If you want all of office you have all four files, if you just need Excel, you have two.
What is more common - developer only wanting pre-2003 office support or current support but for a particular application? The current structure seems to break it up into core, xml core, and xml schemas. Is the xml core used without the xml schema? If I were to only need pre-2003 support, it would probably be simpler to remove the folder for xml classes than what we'd have to do now to try and break up the applications. - Jeff On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 7:12 AM, Nick Burch <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, 26 May 2011, Mark Fortner wrote: > >> This kinda begs the question "is POI modular enough". I've seen a number >> of >> questions arising from people not having the right set of dependent >> libraries. But having a lighter weight set of libraries would also be >> useful. Perhaps as the original poster suggested, having a separate >> library >> for each type of document would make things easier. >> > > Given the ratio of questions to the list for "I'm missing a bit of POI > because I've forgotten a jar" to "I don't want all of POI", I think the push > would possibly be towards a single monolithic jar! > > There's quite a bit of code that's common between all the components, so > we'd end up with something like: > * poi-core > * poi-hssf > * poi-hslf > * poi-hwpf > * poi-all-other-scratchpad > * poi-ooxml-core > * poi-ooxml-xssf > * poi-ooxml-xwpf > * poi-ooxml-xslf > * poi-ooxml-schemas-core > * poi-ooxml-schemas-xssf > * poi-ooxml-schemas-xwpf > * poi-ooxml-schemas-xslf > and possibly something else... The risk of people missing something or > getting one from the wrong version seems much to high to me! > > Also, people interested in getting a cut down version of POI are likely to > all have different requirements. If you want only excel, but also low > memory, then you can exclude much of the hssf usermodel and keep just the > low level parts. It all depends. I think it's probably better for people > with specific requirements to slice and dice it how they need. > > > Since I don't tend to build POI I was wondering if it would be difficult >> to modify the build to produce separate jars and to perhaps zip up the >> dependencies that people keep neglecting to download? >> > > If you download the binary release, then it has all the dependencies in it, > along with the POI jars and the documentation. If you use maven, it handles > fetching the dependencies for you. They're all already there... > > > Nick > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] > For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] > >
