Re: Google Summer of Code

Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson wrote:

Would be cool to have in PEAR, PHP 5 stuff :-) Would mean Christian would have to make a OLE2 tho (something you'd be interested in doing Christian ?) Hmm, well, I guess I could to a quick PHP5 upgrade, if there was enough interest. But it is not one of my own priorities.

The PEAR OLE package has been included in the PHPExcel project (under their original license) and converted to PHP5, so perhaps these files could be used as a starting point if anyone else is interested. But it really is just a simple conversion from e.g. "var $foo" to "private $foo" etc.

Is the OLE package something we should hang on to, the concept, if we do a excel writer PHP 5 thing ? I think so, yes (.xls files only, .xlsx are based on ZIP files instead). First of all, the OLE format is not specific to Excel but are also used by other MS software; second, AFAIK the reader and writer are just reading or writing streams, so it would probably be best to keebp the OLE parsing and the Excel parsing separate with a stream wrapper as interface.

I'd like to see a PHP 5 project for the writer, maintenance project would be hard to get in I think, the way I see it David and Christian could mentor it since they have an understanding on the OLE [...] I only know about the OLE format and almost nothing about the Excel format itself, so I can only really help with general PHP advice.

Christian