From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2006-10-29T18:24:50+09:00
Subject: Re: Efficient parsing of large Excel documents in Ruby

Wes Gamble wrote:
> I would love to use JRuby for this app., but don't feel it's quite ready 
> yet (although you guys are moving it forward at an incredible rate and I 
> expect it will be a viable production option in less than a year - keep 
> up the good work).
> 
> Does anyone know if the POI Ruby bindings are a potential solution?  I 
> see
> "Implement support for reading Excel files (easy)" under the list of 
> TODOs so not sure if I could use POI-Ruby to read...
> 
> Anyone have any experience with POI-Ruby?

We appreciate the vote of confidence, and you're probably right about 
JRuby not quite being production ready ("production ready" in the sense 
of having something that won't require a bit of tinkering...there are 
people using it for production apps, but they're comfortable on the 
frontier :)

Don't forget the Java bridge options...from what I hear they work 
reasonably well for neatly-encapsulated libraries like this.

RJB (Ruby-Java Bridge) is the usual recommendation and apparently more 
active project, though YAJB (Yet Another Java Bridge) apparently works too

And there's RubyCLR, which can hook into the CLR and any capacity it has 
for working with Excel.

-- 
Charles Oliver Nutter, JRuby Core Developer
Blogging on Ruby and Java @ headius.blogspot.com
Help spec out Ruby today! @ www.headius.com/rubyspec
headius@headius.com -- charles.nutter@sun.com