Suggestion: need a lightweight, Java library for reading and writing to Excel files.

[Monu Tripathi]

My team mate is working on a Mobile application which should be able to create, read and write excel files. He needs a lightweight Java library that can help here. He tried using JExcelAPI without much luck.

Suggestions are welcome.

Thanks.

[Ulf Dittmer]

Define "lightweight".

Does "Mobile" mean that the underlying platform is not JSE? If not, what is it?

[Monu Tripathi]

The platform is Android.

Android can run J2SE libraries (with some effort); since the applications run on a constrained device(mobile phones etc.) it is required that the imported library be small in size.

There are class libraries in Java for working with excel files. We need a stripped down version of such a library that can be used on a Mobile device.

[Ulf Dittmer]

So the other question was also about Android, not JSE? That information would have been vital to mention.

JExcelApi is open source; it should be easy to dig into it to see why it's throwing that exception.

The core POI library is 1.5 MB in size (assuming we're talking about XLS files, not XLSX). A library like ProGuard can likely reduce that. Would that really be too much? (JExcelAPi, of course, is much smaller to begin with.)

[Monu Tripathi]

Ulf Dittmer wrote:So the other question was also about Android, not JSE? That information would have been vital to mention.

JExcelApi is open source; it should be easy to dig into it to see why it's throwing that exception.

The core POI library is 1.5 MB in size (assuming we're talking about XLS files, not XLSX). A library like ProGuard can likely reduce that. Would that really be too much? (JExcelAPi, of course, is much smaller to begin with.)

Generally, smaller the application size, the better: by default, applications are installed in the phone memory which is only 16 MB on G1(the weakest target handset).

JExcelApi does seem like a better choice and it would be better to look into the source code and figure out the shortcoming.

Will make sure that I dont forget to mention the platform. Thanks for your reply.