[TriLUG] Opensource project seeks help

[Andrew C. Oliver]

Hi All,

I remember I posted on trijug, but I don't remember if I posted here.
I'm working with another developer to create a cocoon 2 serializer that
can output gnumeric XML to M$ XLS format.  Secondly, a general library
for outputing in XLS format in Java.  Lastly a java port of Microsoft's
OLE 2 Compound Document format.

We've got a prototype of the Ole 2 cdf read/writer working.  I'm about
halfway through implementing enough of the XLS format to do simple
spreadsheets.  At the next phase we'll start the serializer.  Once we're
finished with the prototype we finish the design and write the real
thing.  (We've got use cases and some high level sequence diagrams but
no structural or low level stuff... We're using poseidon -- a distro of
argouml for our uml.

What we need is some people who can review our docs and tell us what
sucks about them and how to fix them.  We've documented the POIFS (ole 2
compound doc format) as best as we can, but it lacks a certain
o'reillyesq quality.  As far as I know this will be the first freely
available doc on this format in english that makes much sense (the laola
docs are a bit vague and are obvsiouly written by someone who was still
learning english).  We'll soon be documenting the gnumeric format as
well.  (it will be our raw xml format)

It also might be nice to have a design nanny.(guide us in our design
docs/etc).

I know many of you have other ideas on how to achieve similar things as
this project (using C apis to openoffice and the like), but I'm a java
programmer and this is much more fun.  Secondly, I've worked on a number
of projects where this was just what we needed (albiet the XML is a new
twist it seems logical).  Thirdly, the next time one of those projects
comes up I'd like to not have to suggest a Windows based server because
they don't want to foot a $10,000 bill for formula 1 www.f1j.com and the
accounting department insists on everything in M$ Excel.  Lastly the
api-based (including on windows) methods are inefficient and usually
single-threaded (and single process).

So the project URL is www.sourceforge.net/projects/poi.  If you want to
know what POI stands for you can see the old site at poi.sourcefore.net
(its just a copy of what was on my server).

In another week or so we'll have a prototype of the Excel API (HSSF)
port and some poor documentation (its doc won't be as good because there
are hundreds of low level binary record types and there IS a book on that).

Thanks in advance to anyone interested,

Andrew C. Oliver
Java developer at large