2013/08/26

poink revisited

I didn't get it. No, really, I had seen the poink module in the apposite repository several times already, but I had dismissed it (forgive me, Thomas Hicks) as a variation on Ping Pong or something.



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.
Enjoy !