On Fri, 27 May 2011, Jeff G wrote:
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.
You always need the main POI jar. If you just want excel .xls, stop there. If you want the other binary file formats, add scratchpad.
If you want the ooxml formats, you add the poi-ooxml jar, a schemas jar, and all the xml dependencies.
What is more common - developer only wanting pre-2003 office support or current support but for a particular application?
No idea, sorry. I think people tend to either want to write one format, or read from all of them.
The current structure seems to break it up into core, xml core, and xml schemas. Is the xml core used without the xml schema?
No, but you have a choice of two schemas jars. You can either use the full one, or the smaller "common parts" poi-ooxml-schemas one. That's one of the main reasons for keeping it seperate.
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.
If you want to only do binary formats, you need the main poi jar, and scratchpad for the non excel formats. You don't need any of the xml jars (POI or dependencies) if you want to only do the older formats.
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