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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
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<!DOCTYPE document PUBLIC "-//APACHE//DTD Documentation V1.1//EN" "./dtd/document-v11.dtd">
<document>
<header>
<title>Apache POI - Project History</title>
<authors>
<person id="AO" name="Andrew C. Oliver" email="acoliver@apache.org"/>
</authors>
</header>
<body>
<section><title>Apache POI - Brief Project History</title>
<p>The POI project was dreamed up back around April 2001, when
Andrew Oliver landed a short term contract to do Java-based
reporting to Excel. He'd done this project a few times before
and knew right where to look for the tools he needed.
Ironically, the API he used to use had skyrocketed from around
$300 ($US) to around $10K ($US). He figured it would take two
people around six months to write an Excel port so he
recommended the client fork out the $10K.
</p>
<p>Around June 2001, Andrew started thinking how great it would
be to have an open source Java tool to do this and, while he
had some spare time, he started on the project and learned
about OLE 2 Compound Document Format. After hitting some real
stumpers he realized he'd need help. He posted a message to
his local Java User's Group (JUG) and asked if anyone else
would be interested. He lucked out and the most talented Java
programmer he'd ever met, Marc Johnson, joined the project. He
ran rings around Andrew at porting OLE 2 CDF and rewrote his
skeletal code into a more sophisticated library. It took Marc
a few iterations to get something they were happy with.
</p>
<p>While Marc worked on that, Andrew ported XLS to Java, based
on Marc's library. Several users wrote in asking to read XLS
(not just write as had originally been planned) and one user
had special requests for a different use for POIFS. Before
long, the project scope had tripled. POI 1.0 was released a
month later than planned, but with far more features. Marc
quickly wrote the serializer framework and HSSF Serializer in
record time and Andrew banged out more documentation and worked
on making people aware of the project
</p>
<p> Shortly before the release, POI was fortunate to come into
contact with Nicola -Ken- Barrozzi who gave them samples for
the HSSF Serializer and help uncover its unfortunate bugs
(which were promptly fixed). More recently, Ken ported most
of the POI project documentation to XML from Andrew's crappy
HTML docs he wrote with Star Office.
</p>
<p> Around the same time as the release, Glen Stampoultzis
joined the project. Glen was ticked off at Andrew's flippant attitude
towards adding graphing to HSSF. Glen got so ticked off he decided to
grab a hammer and do it himself. Glen has already become an integral
part of the POI development community; his contributions to HSSF have
already started making waves.
</p>
<p>Somewhere in there we decided to finally submit the project
to <link href="http://cocoon.apache.org/">The Apache
Cocoon Project</link>, only to discover the project had
outgrown fitting nicely into just Cocoon long ago.
Furthermore, Andrew started eyeing other projects he'd like to
see POI functionality added to. So it was decided to donate
the Serializers and Generators to Cocoon, other POI
integration components to other projects, and the POI APIs
would become part of Jakarta. It was a bumpy road but it
looks like everything turned out since you're reading this!
</p>
<p>In Early 2007, we graduated from
<link href="http://jakarta.apache.org/">Jakarta</link>, and became
our own Top Level Project (TLP) within Apache.</p>
</section>
<!--
<section><title>What's next for Poi</title>
<p>First we'll tackle this from a project standpoint: Well, we
made an offer to Microsoft and Actuate (tongue in cheek
... well mostly) that we'd quit the project and retire if
they'd simply write us each a really large check. I've yet to
get a phone call or email so I'm assuming they're not going to
pay us to go away.
</p>
<p>Next, we've got some work to do here at Jakarta to finish
integrating POI into the community. Furthermore, we're
still transitioning the Serializer to Cocoon.
</p>
<p>HSSF, during the 2.0 cycle, will undergo a few
optimizations. We'll also be adding new features like a full
implementation of Formulas and custom text formats. We're
hoping to be able to generate smaller files by adding
write-support for RK, MulRK and MulBlank records. I'm also
going to work on a Cocoon 2 Generator. Currently, reading is
not very efficient in HSSF. This is mainly because in order to
write or modify, one needs to be able to update upstream
pointers to downstream data. To do this you have to have
everything between in memory. A Generator would allow SAX
events to be processed instead. (This will be based on the low
level structures). One of the great things about this is that,
you'll not only have a more efficient way to read the file,
you'll have a great way to use spreadsheets as XML data
sources.
</p>
<p>The HSSF Serializer, will further separate into a general
framework for creating serializers for other formats and the
HSSF Serializer specific implementation. (This is largely
already true). We'll also be adding support for features
already supported by HSSF (styles, fonts, text formats). We're
hoping to add support for formulas during this cycle.
</p>
<p>We're beginning to expand our scope yet again. If we could
do all of this for XLS files, what about Doc files or PowerPoint
files? We're thinking that our next component (HWPF - Manipulates
Word Processor Format) should follow the same pattern. We're hoping
that new blood will join the team and allow us to tackle this
even faster (in part because POIFS is already finished). But
maybe what we need most is you! </p>
</section> -->
</body>
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<legal>
Copyright (c) @year@ The Apache Software Foundation All rights reserved.
$Revision$ $Date$
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</document>
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