Friday, September 22, 2006

Java voor Excel Quiz

Here are some projects:
- JExcel
- Java Excel API (aka JExcelApi)
- JXL
- POI

Which one does not belong in the list?

I'll post the answer in a few days with some more information on each project.

Update 2006-09-26

JExcel is a commercial library for for integrating Microsoft Excel into Swing applications. It will actually show an Excel sheet in your Java app (you do need Excel installed). From your Java code you can change the worksheets. Sounds neat, but I wonder who would want to use this. One thing I found is that the API seems to be a evolution of the following project: Java Excel API.

Java Excel API is an open source java library with which you can read, write, and modify Excel spreadsheets. I am currently using this one as it had some better blogs then POI. Although it does it works, I am not completely happy with it. The API is not consistent (for example: you can make something bold, but there is no obvious way to check whether a format is made bold) and the package structure and class names are kind of weird.

JXL is an umbrella for a couple of small open source java library with which you can build distributed Java programs with distributed class loading. I did not look much further into this. It seems that it tries to do JavaSpaces like things.

POI is again an open source project with which you can read, write and modify OLE2 documents including Excel and Word files. I have never used this, so I can not compare it to JExcelApi.

So the answer is: JXL.

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