Contact Us  Contact Us
empty
  
 
SilverDust - The Secure Access to Mobile SharePoint
Recently Launched! SilverDust, The Secure Access to Mobile SharePoint.
visit site  
 
 
  
 
Packaged Services
New OfficeWriter Support Packages
  Learn more  
 
 
  
New OfficeWriter V4.1
Features & Benefits
Learn more
 
 
  
Upcoming Shows:
Visit us at the SharePoint Evolution Conference!
 
 
empty
Skip Navigation LinksOfficeWriter Home > Company Home > officewriter-322.aspx


POI's Ryan Ackley Joins SoftArtisans
divider
POI's Ryan Ackley has joined the SoftArtisans Development team, providing his expertise in Java™ and Office file formats to the leader in cross-platform Excel and Word Web reporting.

Before joining SoftArtisans, Ackley worked at the (NASA) Kennedy Space Center as a senior programming analyst. But it was his key contributions to the Jakarta POI Open Source project where he gained his prominence in the Java! community.

We recently sat down with Ackley to discuss POI, Open Source and advancements in MS Office Web reporting.

 
 
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!
 
 
 
Purchase | Evaluate | Demos | Support | Contact Us | Site Map
Copyright 2010 © SoftArtisans, Inc. All Rights Reserved.