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List:       apache-announce
Subject:    [ANNOUNCE] The Apache Software Foundation Announces 10th Anniversary of Apache POI
From:       Sally Khudairi <sk () apache ! org>
Date:       2011-08-30 12:06:00
Message-ID: 1314705960.55343.YahooMailNeo () web30805 ! mail ! mud ! yahoo ! com
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[this announcement is available online at http://s.apache.org/ROg] 

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),  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.

# # #

CONTACT: Sally Khudairi
         The Apache Software Foundation
         press@apache.org
         +1 617 921 8656


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