Generating Excel Files On Google App Engine For A Wicket Application

We are porting an existing Wicket application on Google App Engine. This application uses Wicket, Spring and Hibernate. If you read will it play in app engine, you will notice that Wicket is semi compatible and it does work with workarounds. Hibernate on the other hand is incompatible and Spring is fully supported. We began porting this application after changing persistence to use JPA instead of hibernate. We used workarounds for wicket described here.

This application generates Excel sheets and used Apache POI for generating Excel reports. Apache POI is not supported in Google App engine and it seems that Apache POI will not change their implementation to make it work for Google App Engine in near future.

We started looking at ways to generate Excel sheets. We decided on using java Excel API for our application. Let’s see how can we generate excel files for a Wicket application on Google App engine.

First of all add the maven dependency for JExcel in the application:

<dependency>
    <groupId>net.sourceforge.jexcelapi</groupId>
    <artifactId>jxl</artifactId>
    <version>2.6.10</version>
</dependency>