The Apache Software Foundation>>[ANNOUNCE] The Apache Software Foundation Announces 10th Anniversary of Apache POI

[ANNOUNCE] The Apache Software Foundation Announces 10th Anniversary of Apache POI:

[this announcement is available online at http://s.apache.org/ROg]Â



Open Source project in use at Deutsche Bank, IBM, J.P. Morgan, NASA, Siemens and more.



Forest Hill, MD, Aug. 30, 2011 -- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), Â the all-volunteer

developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today

announced the 10th anniversary of Apache POI. First created in 2001, Apache POI's cross-platform

Open Source Java APIs allow users to read and write various file formats from the Microsoft

Office suite of applications, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Visio, and Publisher.



Apache POI is deployed in many highly-visible environments including CERN, Deutsche Bank,

Freddie Mac, IBM, J.P. Morgan, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, NASA, SAP, and Siemens,

among others. In addition, Apache POI is also used in Open Source projects such as Alfresco,

JasperReports and Apache Tika.



"Apache POI's powerful solutions give users the ability to create and maintain many Office

OpenXML (OOXML) and OLE2-based file formats," said Yegor Kozlov, Vice President of Apache

POI. "With POI, you can do almost anything that you can with Microsoft Office products, only

using Java."



The latest stable release of the project is v3.8beta4 (August 2011). Highlights include:



- the ability to read and write OLE2 files, including .xls, .doc, and .ppt, as well as MFC

serialization API based file formats;



- the ability to read and write OOXML files, including .xlsx, .docx, and .pptx;



- a low-level API to support Open Packaging Conventions using openxml4j;



- highly-developed Java APIs for Excel workbooks, Word documents, and PowerPoint presentations;



- support for Outlook messages and attachments;



- converters for Excel and Word documents to streamline document production and consumption

in HTML and XSLF-FO formats; and



- porting other OOXML and OLE2 formats



"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." said Senaka Fernando, Apache

Member and Governance Registry Product Manager at WSO2.



In addition, POI's robust spreadsheet API enables advanced formatting, graphics, conditional

formatting, data validations and evaluation of Excel formulas. Its streaming spreadsheet API

increases performance when used for very large spreadsheet production with limited heap space.



"The spreadsheet libraries in Apache POI have been invaluable in our efforts to streamline

workflows for renewable-energy infrastructure modeling and analysis," said Brian Bush, Principal

Engineer, Energy Forecasting & Modeling Group, US Department of Energy National Renewable

Energy Laboratory. "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."



To improve functionality, the Apache POI project often collaborates with other Apache projects

and Open Source communities that include Apache Cocoon, Lucene, OpenOffice, and Tika.



"We've donated components directly to those projects for POI-enabling them, and welcome additional

contributions," added Kozlov.



Availability and Oversight

As with all Apache products, Apache POI software is released under the Apache License v2.0,

and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management

Committee (PMC) guides the Project’s day-to-day operations, including community development

and product releases. Apache POI source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources

are available at http://poi.apache.org/.



About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)

Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading

Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server -- the world's most popular Web server

software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 350

individual Members and 3,000 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available

enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions

are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing

lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings,

and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations

and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, IBM, HP,

Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo!. For more information,

visit http://www.apache.org/.



"Apache" and "Apache POI" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands

and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.



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CONTACT: Sally Khudairi

         The Apache Software Foundation

         press@apache.org

         +1 617 921 8656





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