On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 4:28 PM, Mark Murphy/STAR BASE Consulting Inc.
<mmurphy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But it works, and there is no comparable RPG library. It would take quite a bit of work to make one that has the capabilities of POI.
Possibly nothing comparable; definitely nothing that is both
comparable and publicly available. ;)
Scott wrote an all-RPG writer for his own use. I don't remember if he
said he included read capability as well. In any case, I would be very
surprised and impressed if it were as feature-complete as POI. As
you've implied, POI's capabilities are extensive.
If someone knows of something that is comparable, let me know. Maybe if there are enough interested parties, we could port something. Maybe there is something written in C or C++ out there that is compiled for PASE, or that can be ported to qshell?
If we assume writing a pure-RPG equivalent to POI is out of the
question because it would require exorbitant effort (not a bad
assumption, in my book), then the best answer left for reducing the
Goldbergian nature of calling POI via RPG is to learn Java and use POI
directly from Java. Porting anything else, with the purpose of using
RPG to call it, would just be substituting one Rube Goldberg machine
for another.
That said, I think there are better options than Java+POI. I have been
plugging Python and XlsxWriter, xlrd, and OpenPyXL for quite a long
time now. Some combination of those packages will provide more than
enough functionality for most shops. In particular, XlsxWriter is an
extremely capable pure writer, even more capable than POI in some
areas, such as charts.
I will say POI is *on balance* more complete than any of the Python
packages (or indeed, probably anything out there for any language),
but I suspect most shops only use a fraction of what POI can do. Plus,
POI is just not as easy or as pleasant to use as the Python options,
if you're starting from zero knowledge of both Java and Python.
John Y.
midrange.com
