Call Center Software Featured Article

The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates the 10th Anniversary of Apache POI

By Calvin Azuri
TMCnet Contributor

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), volunteer developers of close to 150 Open Source (News - Alert) initiatives and start-up projects, announced the 10th anniversary of Apache POI. The Apache POI, which was created in 2001 with its cross-platform Open Source Java APIs, enables functionalities such as reading and writing of several file formats from different Microsoft (News - Alert) Office tools which include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Publisher. Enterprises and agencies which leverage Apache POI include CERN, Deutsche Bank, Freddie Mac, IBM (News - Alert), and J.P. Morgan to name a few.

In a release, Yegor Kozlov, Vice President of Apache POI said that "Apache POI's powerful solutions give users the ability to create and maintain many Office OpenXML (OOXML) and OLE2-based file formats. With POI, you can do almost anything that you can with Microsoft Office products, only using Java. We've donated components directly to those projects for POI-enabling them, and welcome additional contributions.”

Key highlights of the recently introduced v3.8beta4 release of the project include capability which enables reading and writing of OLE2 and OOXML files in addition to MFC serialization of API based file formats. The v3.8beta4 has a low-level API capable of supporting Open Packaging Conventions via openxml4j and features advanced Java APIs for Excel workbooks, Word documents, and PowerPoint presentations. It also provides support for Outlook messages and attachments and converters for Excel and Word documents for enhancing document production and consumption in HTML and XSLF-FO formats. Additionally, it has the ability to port different OOXML and OLE2 formats.

Senaka Fernando, Apache Member and Governance Registry Product Manager at WSO2 said that "Apache POI is a vital component of WSO2's Middleware Platforms and Open PaaS. WSO2 Governance Registry makes use of Apache POI to extract keywords to build its search index for MS Office Documents stored within the resource repository. Meanwhile, WSO2 Data Services Server relies on Apache POI to access MS Excel spreadsheets as Data Sources; making it possible to read data from any Excel Sheet and expose them through Data Services.”

Providing increased flexibility, the POI's powerful spreadsheet API has been primed to offer advanced formatting, graphics, validation of data and analysis of Excel formulas.

Brian Bush, Principal Engineer, Energy Forecasting & Modeling Group, US Department of Energy National Renewable Energy Laboratory said that "The spreadsheet libraries in Apache POI have been invaluable in our efforts to streamline workflows for renewable-energy infrastructure modeling and analysis. The clean and robust API that POI provides made it easy for us to embed externally provided spreadsheets within our applications and to evaluate the formulae within those spreadsheets as part of a larger set of analytic computations. We also found that POI opened new avenues for exposing spreadsheets as Web services and for Apache Ant-based regression testing of spreadsheets."

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.