Reading your article, I very much agree with your scepticism, especially regarding WordMessML. However, let's see things from the sunny side. SpreadsheetML is the thing I was working with during these past months and it's shortcommings (no charts, no VBA, no etc.) could be seen as benefits if you want to keep things basic and simple. At least it opens the possibility to integrate Excel, data and structures held therein with Java.

We use SpreadsheetML to open up Excel files, process it's data and data-structures in a Java-application and after transformation store the results in other data-repositories. We use SpreadsheetML to dynamically create Excel files in a web-application and in this way give our clients the opportunity to download the requested data in an application (Excel) that is ready to do analyses, calculations and information-retrieval.

I gather feedback on your article is not intended to promote software libraries however, our solution to integrating Excel and Java can be found at http://xelem.sourceforge.net/

greetings,