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    <header>
        <title>HSSF</title>
        <subtitle>Alternatives to HSSF</subtitle>
        <authors>
            <person name="Andrew Oliver" email="acoliver at apache.org"/>
        </authors>
    </header>

    <body>
        <section><title>Alternatives</title>
            <p>
                Maybe it's unwise to advertise your competitors but we believe
                competition is good and we have the best support reading and
                write Excel workbooks currently available. This however does not
				purport to be a complete list. 
            </p>
            <table>
                <tr>
                    <th>Product</th>
                    <th>URL</th>
                    <th>Description</th>
                </tr>
                <tr>
                    <td>JSC</td>
                    <td>
                        <link href="http://jsc.tomschuetz.com">jsc.tomschuetz.com</link>
                    </td>
                    <td>Reading, calculating standard and VBA functions with 
                        Java at runtime.  
                    </td>
                </tr>
                <tr>
                    <td>Formula One</td>
                    <td>
                        <link href="http://www.tidestone.com/">ReportingEngines (division of Actuate Corporation)</link>
                    </td>
                    <td>An alternative to this project is to
                        buy the $5000 per server installation.</td>
                </tr>
                <tr>
                    <td>Visual Basic</td>
                    <td>
                        <link href="http://www.microsoft.com/">www.microsoft.com</link>
                    </td>
                    <td>Give up XML and write Visual Basic code on a Microsoft Windows based
                    Environment or output in Microsoft's beta and primarily undocumented
                    XML for office format.</td>
                </tr>
                <tr>
                    <td>JExcel</td>
                    <td>http://stareyes.homeip.net:8888</td>
                    <td>Frequently unavailable.  Little currently known about it's capabilities.</td>
                </tr>
                <tr>
                    <td>JWorkbook</td>
                    <td>http://www.object-refinery.com/jworkbook/index.html</td>
                    <td>This effort supports Gnumeric and Excel, however the Excel part is done using POI anyway.</td>
                </tr>
                <tr>
                    <td>xlReader</td>
                    <td><link href="http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/xlrd">http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/xlrd</link></td>
                    <td>Provides decent support for reading Excel.</td>
                </tr>
                <tr>
                    <td>Excel ODBC Driver</td>
                    <td><link href="http://www.nwlink.com/~leewal/content/exceljavasample.htm">http://www.nwlink.com/~leewal/content/exceljavasample.htm</link></td>
                    <td>ODBC offers a somewhat wierd method for using Excel.</td>
                </tr>
                <tr>
                    <td>ExtenXLS</td>
                    <td><link href="http://www.extentech.com/products/ExtenXLS/docs/intro3.jsp">http://www.extentech.com/products/ExtenXLS/docs/intro3.jsp</link></td>
                    <td>Commercial library for reading, modifying and writing Excel spreadsheets.  Not cheap but
                    certainly a lot more affordable than Formula 1.  No idea as to it's quality.</td>
                </tr>
                <tr>
                    <td>J-Integra Java-Excel Bridge</td>
                    <td><link href="http://www.intrinsyc.com/products/bridging/jintegra.asp">http://www.intrinsyc.com/products/bridging/jintegra.asp</link></td>
                    <td>Uses DCOM to an Excel instance on a windows machine.</td>
                </tr>
                <tr>
                    <td>Perl &amp; C</td>
                    <td>-</td>
                    <td>There are a number of perl and C libraries, however none of them are consistent.</td>
                </tr>
                <tr>
                    <td>VistaJDBC</td>
                    <td><link href="http://www.vistaportal.com/products/vistajdbc.htm">http://www.vistaportal.com/products/vistajdbc.htm</link></td>
                    <td>VistaJDBC driver works with both StarOffice and Excel spreadsheets and
                        can access data using standard SQL statements without any API programming.
                        VistaJDBC also implemented ability to choose by not just rows and columns but by
                        specific cells, ranges of cells, etc.
                    </td>
                </tr>
                <tr>
                    <td>Coldtags Excel Tag Library</td>
                    <td><link href="http://www.servletsuite.com/servlets/exceltag.htm">http://www.servletsuite.com/servlets/exceltag.htm</link></td>
                    <td>
                        This library outputs a simple CSV file, in which cells can
                        contain numbers or text.  You could output a CSV file without its
                        help, but it gives a little more readability/structure to the code, and
                        could be extended to handle more complexity.  When
                        you invoke one of these JSP pages from your browser, you open up an Excel
                        spreadsheet.  There's no formatting, worksheets, or anything fancy like that.
                        So it's not strictly a competitor but it does the job.
                    </td>
                </tr>
            </table>
        </section>
    </body>
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