Java connection to / between Microsoft Windows Office Suite?

Question

I read elsewhere (a response by "hazzen" here) that .NET has "a binding for the entire Office suite outlined here that allows you to write COM-based methods that you can call from Office. It is intended for automation, but you can write any managed code you want and have Excel call into it."

I'm interested in the same thing for Java. My present solution runs a standard Windows program that launches Java, whereupon any results are essentially sent to standard out and the intermediate program captures these and feeds the result back in to Excel - also using what amounts to std-out.

There has to be a better way!

Is there such a "binding" available for Java?

I'd also be pleased by any pointers to web articles or whathaveyou that teach about this kind of integration issue.

Answer 1

JCOB, j-Interop and J-Integra might do something like it. Ockham's Flashlight: Java/COM, Java/Win32 Integration resources has more links.

Answer 2

Apache POI has java bindings to Excel which work quite nice. It also does Word/Outlook/PPT, but I recall Excel integration being its strongpoint.