Release 0.1 of Tika is out, grab it while it's hot!

There's almost no standalone documentation currently, but between the javadocs and the simple and fairly complete test cases, it shouldn't be hard to figure out how to use it.

What does Tika do? Basically, extract data and metadata from various binary formats. It's meant to be a framework for plugging in more binary decoders, and we expect it to be used in various Apache projects, instead of each project reinventing the wheel.

Here's an example, from the ExcelParserTest:

public void testExcelParser() throws Exception {

InputStream input =
  ExcelParserTest.class.getResourceAsStream(
    "/test-documents/testEXCEL.xls");
try {
  Metadata metadata = new Metadata();
  StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
  ContentHandler handler = new WriteOutContentHandler(writer);
  new ExcelParser().parse(input, handler, metadata);

  assertEquals(
    "application/vnd.ms-excel",
    metadata.get(Metadata.CONTENT_TYPE));

  assertEquals("Simple Excel document", metadata.get(Metadata.TITLE));
  assertEquals("Keith Bennett", metadata.get(Metadata.AUTHOR));

  String content = writer.toString();
  assertTrue(content.contains("Sample Excel Worksheet"));
  assertTrue(content.contains("Numbers and their Squares"));
  assertTrue(content.contains("9.0"));
  assertTrue(content.contains("196.0"));

} finally {
  input.close();
}
}

Thanks to Chris Mattmann (Tika's release manager) and the whole team for all the work that made this first release possible!