poi/src/documentation/content/xdocs/hwpf/index.xml

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<document>
<header>
<title>Apache POI - HWPF - Java API to Handle Microsoft Word Files</title>
<subtitle>Overview</subtitle>
<authors>
<person name="Nicola Ken Barozzi" email="barozzi@nicolaken.com"/>
<person name="Andrew C. Oliver" email="acoliver@apache.org"/>
<person name="Ryan Ackley" email="sackley@apache.org"/>
<person name="Rainer Klute" email="klute@apache.org"/>
</authors>
</header>
<body>
<section><title>Overview</title>
<p>HWPF is the name of our port of the Microsoft Word 97(-2007) file format
to pure Java. It <em>does not</em> support the new Word 2007 .docx
file format, which is not OLE2 based.</p>
<p>HWPF is still in early development. It is in the <link
href="http://svn.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/poi/trunk/src/scratchpad/">
scratchpad section of the SVN.</link> You will need to ensure you
either have a recent SVN checkout, or a recent SVN nightly build
(including the scratchpad jar!)</p>
<p>Source in the
<em>org.apache.poi.hwpf.model</em> tree is the old legacy code refactored
into an object model. Source code in the
<em>org.apache.poi.hwpf.extractor</em> tree is a wrapper of this to
facilitate easy extraction of interesting things (eg the Text).
Source code in the <em>org.apache.poi.hdf</em> tree is the old legacy
code.
</p>
<section>
<title>HWPF Pointman Needed!</title>
<p>At the moment we unfortunately do not have someone taking care for HWPF
and fostering its development. What we need is someone to stand up, take
this thing under his hood as his baby and push it forward. Ryan Ackley,
who put a lot of effort into HWPF, is no longer on board, so HWPF is an
orphan child waiting to be adopted.</p>
<p>If <strong>you</strong> are interested in becoming the new HWPF
pointman, you should look into the Microsoft Word internals. A good
starting point seems to be Ryan Ackley's <link
href="docoverview.html">overview</link>. This document contains a link to
a detailled Word format description you can find somewhere at
<link href="http://www.wotsit.org/">http://www.wotsit.org/</link>. Please
do not contact Ryan Ackley directly, because he is working for a company
now that signed a NDA with Microsoft and thus he will be no longer able to
answer questions.</p>
<p>As a first step you should familiarize yourself with the source code,
examples, test cases, and the HWPF patches available at <link
href="http://issues.apache.org/">Bugzilla</link> (if any). Then you
should compile an overview of</p>
<ul>
<li>the current HWPF status,</li>
<li>the patches in <link
href="http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/">Bugzilla</link> to be checked
in (and those that should better be ditched),</li>
<li>the available test cases and the test cases still to be written,</li>
<li>the available documentation and the docs to be written,</li>
<li>anything else that seems reasonable</li>
</ul>
<p>When you start start coding, you will not yet have write access to the
CVS repository. Please submit your patches to <link
href="http://issues.apache.org/">Bugzilla</link> and nag <link
href="mailto:klute@apache.org">Rainer Klute</link> until he commits
them. Besides the actual checking in of HWPF patches Rainer will also do
some minor reviews now and then of your source code patches, test cases
and documentation to help ensure software quality. But most of the time
you will be on your own.</p>
<p>Please do not forget to write <link
href="http://www.junit.org/">JUnit</link> test cases and documentation!
We won't accept code that doesn't come with test cases. And please
consider that other contributors should be able to understand your source
code easily. If you need any help getting started with JUnit test cases
for HWPF, please ask on the developers' mailing list! If you show that you
are prepared to stick at it you will most likely be given CVS commit
access.</p>
<p><strong>Important:</strong> It is legally vital for POI that you have
never seen any documentation or specification from Microsoft that required
you or your employer to sign an NDA to get it. Please do read the <link
href="../getinvolved/index.html">"Contribution to POI" page</link> for
details! This page also contains further information for you to start POI
development.</p>
<p>Of course we will help you as best as we can. However, presently there
is no committer who is really familiar with the Word format, so you'll be
mostly on your own. We are looking forward for you and your contributions!
Honor and glory of becoming a POI committer are waiting!</p>
</section>
</section>
</body>
</document>
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