Reading Microsoft files from Java code is one of the little joys in life (he said sarcastically, through clenched teeth). I’ve worked with the Apache POI project to do this successfully in the past. I recently came across MPXJ. It sits on top of POI to allow Java developers to manipulate Microsoft Project Exchange (MPX), Microsoft
Project (MPP, MPT), and Microsoft Project Data Interchange (MSPDI) files. The project is at SourceForge.
For readers interested in Alfresco, one thing you can do with this library is use it to create metadata extractors and content transformers for Microsoft Project. The latter enables Project files to be full-text indexed by the Lucene search engine. The MPXJ library depends on the same version of Apache POI that is shipped with Alfresco 2.2 Enterprise and 2.9 Community (Apache POI 3.0.2).
