Re: [Libreoffice] an attempt to connect LO to the unhosted web

Hi Michiel,

On Mon, 2011-02-28 at 20:50 +0100, Michiel de Jong wrote:
> Since today I am a full-time developer of the Unhosted project.

        Great ;-)

>  Specifically, our first goal is creating an alternative to Google
> Docs. The first step towards this will be a proof-of-concept that
> explains the idea we have.

        Great. In order to do this in a way that is complimentary to
LibreOffice, rather than providing a pure duplication of it (probably in
JavaScript ;-), and thus in order to work together effectively - I
suggest you read:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2011-January/006399.html

        and the following thread, -before- starting coding.

> The proof of concept (working title: LibreDocs) will be much like
> slideshare: To write the document you use LO on your desktop, but then
> you publish it to the unhosted web in odf format

        So - on-line / CMS / publishing integration is something that is
currently pretty ugly and unpleasant to use in LibreOffice - I'd love to
see that improved, regardless of what server technology you choose.

> The unhosted odf viewer will be based almost entirely on webodf, the
> excellent javascript library that Jos van den Oever published
> recently.

        Well; IMHO you can do a lot better for an editor - perhaps for a view
it works, but even so - I strongly suggest reading the thread above
before starting. Your initial choice of technologies will have a very
strong influence on two things:

        * feature depth & time to market
                + do you want to make decisions to start with that cut
                  out tons of possible features ?
                + how about ones that commit you to re-writing many
                  millions of lines of Javascript ?

        * co-operation vs. competition
                + does your approach allow you to re-use LibreOffice
                  code, and work as part of our fun community 
        or...   + are you going to invest your effort in attempting to
                  re-write and compete with it; in which case you will
                  have very limited support from me (at least) ;-)

> As I said, this email is FYI, I've only just started working on this
> today. I'll let you know when I have something working. It's not much
> use discussing it much before it exists.

        Au contraire :-) it is great to get the initial design right, and
(preferably) done in a way that can deliver you a great, complete
product, quickly, and with 95% of the code shared with us.

        ATB,

                Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks@novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot