As you can read in some of my other recent posts, the business of massaging data into other formats (a process we call transreption in Resource Oriented Computing) is booming. A lot of data today lives in spreadsheets. Or lets call it by the brand, a lot of data today lives in excel sheets.
Natively that format is not available in NetKernel, but as my post of last week showed, that can be quickly mended. So I looked around for a likely candidate library and I found one, Apache POI.
I didn't see it. No, really, so I did a bit of studying of the library myself and came up with the stuff I needed for the task at hand. Next project comes round and again excel sheets are involved, so I smile happily, until my lead says ... right, I've tried PoiNK on it, but it doesn't quite seem to do the job, can you have a look at that. PoiNK ? Apache POI for NetKernel ! Oops.
Sorry about that Thomas. You're stuff is very good. It needed a bit of a refresh (work on it was done in 2008, the Apache POI library has evolved a bit since then), so I started on that. The result (representations and transreptors ready) is work in progress and can be found here.
Note the following things :
- Although I renamed things in my version, Thomas Hicks still retains the original rights to the code. At this time (2013/08/26) it is still his module in the Apposite repository and this is just an alternative that you can use if you run into a problem with the version in Apposite. Regardless of license (Apache 2.0 in this case), I always render onto Caesar what is Caesar's.
- I'm only provided sources. Watch this space for a couple of posts on building NetKernel modules soon.
- The Apache POI library has to be added in the lib-subdirectory. I tested it with just the poi-3.9-20131203.jar file and that works fine.