On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 1:30 PM, Mark Murphy/STAR BASE Consulting Inc.
<mmurphy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Many of the issue come from folks trying to use old versions of POI, and a general lack of current IBM i specific documentation. I would submit that Python suffers from the latter as well, possibly even more so than Java.
Well, I hear you, but the issue with i-specific information regarding
Python is that if you are talking about IBM's Python, then it simply
hasn't existed very long; whereas Java has been on the i for ages. If
you are talking about iSeriesPython, I'd say the documentation is
roughly what one would expect for such a tiny project with so few
*users*, never mind so few developers and contributors. What is
surprising about all the threads talking about the same Java problems
over and over again is that Java *is* heavily used on the i, by at
least a couple orders of magnitude more than Python on the i. In
particular, POI and Scott's wrappers are very popular in the i
community. Most of the i community doesn't even know what Python is.
The current version of POI (3.14) runs well on 7.1 in the 6.26 JVM, is tested with Java 6, 7, and 8, and contains in it's jar all the necessary components. You don't have to get anything elsewhere as the dependencies have changed since Scott's articles were written.
This is what I mean by a lot of versions though. As Rob is fond of
pointing out, only certain versions of Java are supported on any given
i release. So you have some people that need to be using old stuff,
because their i is old (and some mistakenly try to use the newest
stuff and have problems). Sure, the "correct" answer is to upgrade
their i so that they can use the latest Java, not to mention all the
other benefits of being up to date. But that's kind of a heavyweight
solution for just trying to manipulate a damn Excel file, no?
There is only one version of iSeriesPython that anyone on V5R3 and up
needs to worry about, namely the latest one. Any of the add-on Python
packages for Excel file manipulation worth considering (xlwt, xlrd,
XlsxWriter, and OpenPyXL) work with that version of iSeriesPython.
For folks that are stuck on versions of the OS earlier than V5R3, they
are not *completely* out of luck with iSeriesPython, but the situation
does get much trickier. (I still have a modified version of xlwt that
I used on V5R2 with a much older iSeriesPython that I might be able to
dust off if needed.)
John Y.
midrange.com
