| Q: |
Having worked in both realms,
what are your thoughts now on Open Source vs. commercial software? |
| A: |
I think they
both have a place in the software ecosystem. Without commercial software,
all software developers would essentially be hobbyists. I don't want
that to happen. I love developing software for a living. |
| Q: |
What made
you get involved in POI? When did you start? |
| A: |
I had a project
at a former job that required me to extract text from Word documents.
I found that this was something that many people needed to do. I discovered
some old C code that did it and converted it to Java™. Later,
I found a Word 97 file format specification on the Web. I began implementing
this in Java™ with plans to create a commercial library for
converting Word documents into non-proprietary formats. When the POI
project became part of Apache, I contacted them and offered up my
code. All this happened in early 2001. |
| Q: |
How
did you figure out the internals of the Word file format while working
at POI? |
| A: |
I found the
Microsoft documentation for Word 97 on the web. It didn't provide
everything but it helped . I had to dig further and do a little bit
of reverse-engineering. If I ever got really stuck I would go peek
at OpenOffice.org code and see their algorithms for opening or saving
the Word format. But at SoftArtisans we have licensed the Word file
format from Microsoft so it's a lot simpler. |
| Q: |
How much
time did you spend working on POI? |
| A: |
I tried to
make contributions on a weekly basis. I would say about an average
of 5-10 hours a week was devoted to POI. |
| Q: |
Why did
you decide to leave POI and join SoftArtisans? |
| A: |
The reason
was simple; I felt it was a great opportunity. I enjoyed being a part
of Apache, but it didn't provide me with a career. |
| Q: |
Why should
someone use OfficeWriter instead of POI? |
| A: |
There are
several reasons. The first is the number of features that OfficeWriter
provides compared with POI. SoftArtisans provides a solution that
supports all features of Excel and Word. POI doesn't come anywhere
near that. The second is quality of the service and the product. POI
has a handful of volunteer developers who fix bugs and answer questions
at their leisure. SoftArtisans has many developers who are continually
providing cutting-edge features and fantastic customer support. |
| Q: |
Can you
compare the coding effort required with POI and OfficeWriter? |
| A: |
For most common
tasks, POI takes about four times as much coding as OfficeWriter. |
| Q: |
Have you
noticed a report generation difference between OfficeWriter and POI? |
| A: |
OfficeWriter
beats POI hands-down. What I think is clever is that OfficeWriter
has two APIs. One that is optimized for just doing reporting and another
one that is for more general purpose applications. |
| Q: |
Are there
any misconceptions about POI that should be cleared up? |
| A: |
We always
hear the words "free" and "open source" used together, but developing
with open source code may be more costly than you think. Obviously,
the initial cost is free, but you need to consider the cost of paying
one of your developers to spend two weeks integrating it into your
solution. Worse yet, after two weeks you realize POI doesn't provide
the features you need. |
| Q: |
Are there
any other open-source projects that you are involved in or think are
exciting? |
| A: |
One that interests
me is Jakarta Slide. They are a back-end for content repositories.
I see a lot of potential in the field of collaboration and they seem
to be going in the right direction. SoftArtisans has been great in
letting me continue to work on other non-competing open source projects. |
| Q: |
What is
your favorite application server? |
| A: |
JBoss. Because
they never stop innovating. They also happen to be open source and
free. |
| Q: |
What is
your favorite API? |
| A: |
Why WordWriter
of course! |