The Apache POI is pleased to announce the release of POI 3.6. Featured are significant performance improvements and numerous bug fixes. See the downloads page for binary and source distributions: http://poi.apache.org/download.html Release Notes Changes ------------ The most notable changes in this release are: * A "lite" version of ooxml-schemas-1.0.jar called poi-ooxml-schemas-3.6-20091214.jar is included in the binary distribution. This jar replaces the big ooxml-schemas-1.0.jar in the binary distributions and Maven POMs. The poi-ooxml-schemas jar is 10 MB smaller! * Significant memory improvements in XSSF module. When generating data, new code consumes 200% less memory than POI-3.5. * Full support for cell comments in XSSF. * Formula performance and coverage. Lazy evaluation of formulas has been implemented which provides for improvements of 700% in some cases. Your results may vary. * Examples are now included. poi-examples-3.6-20091214.jar includes all of the examples from the poi, poi-scratchpad and poi-ooxml modules. Users have requested this several times. These examples provide excellent templates for POI based applications. Several convertors are included: XLSX2CSV, XLS2CSVmra, BigGridDemo, PPT2PNG, Word2Forrest, and msg2txt. * Maven distribution now includes sources. Each individual JAR is accompanied by a -sources.jar. Two new maven modules were added poi-ooxml-schemas and poi-examples. * Program elements intended for POI internal use only are annotated @Internal. These may be removed or access changed from 'public' to 'default' or less in future versions of POI. A full list of changes is available in the change log: http://poi.apache.org/changes.html. People interested should also follow the dev mailing list to track further progress. Release Contents ---------------- This release comes in two forms: - pre-built binaries containing compiled versions of all Apache POI components and documentation (poi-bin-3.6-20091214.zip or poi-bin-3.6-20091214.tar.gz) - source archive you can build POI from (poi-src-3.6-20091214.zip or poi-src-3.6-20091214.tar.gz) Unpack the archive and use the following command to build all POI components with Apache Ant 1.6+ and JDK 1.5 or higher: ant jar Pre-built versions of all POI components are also available in the central Maven repository under Group ID "org.apache.poi" and Version "3.6" All release artifacts are accompanied by MD5 checksums and a PGP signatures that you can use to verify the authenticity of your download. The public key used for the PGP signature can be found at http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/poi/tags/REL_3_6/KEYS Contributors ------------ The following people have contributed to this release by submitting bug reports or by participating in the issue resolution process (in strict alphabetical order). Bernhard Schwager Ian Beaumont Maxim Valyanskiy Bob Stox Jeremy Michelson Paul Tomlin Bruno Girin Jeff Lamb Petr Udalau Chris Lott Joubert Nel Robert Longson Dale Monti Karl Eilebrecht Robin Salkeld Daniel Noll (Trejkaz) Leonhard Wimmer Thang Nguyen David Agnew Mads Mohr Christensen Vinu Kumar David Horwitz Markus Herven Davor Cubranic Marcus Thiesen Eric Smith Martin Poelman Thank you all very much! Contributions are always welcome, come join the project. About Apache POI ----------------------- Apache POI is well-known in the Java field as a library for reading and writing Microsoft Office file formats, such as Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Word. Since POI 3.5, the new OOXML (Office Open XML) formats introduced in Office 2007 have been supported. See http://poi.apache.org/ for more details