
IceWarp and Collabora Are Working on LibreOffice Online Document Editing - rbanffy
https://libreoffice-from-collabora.com/icewarp-and-collabora-are-working-on-libreoffice-online-document-editing-an-open-source-alternative-to-google-apps-office-365/
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oever
It's very nice to see funding for this LibreOffice initiative. From personal
experience, developing WebODF ([http://webodf.org/](http://webodf.org/)), a
100% JavaScript client-side office, I know that finding investors for
applications that compete in a market that is dominated by big entrenched
players, is a special skill. Competing with a potentially very disruptive (for
the competitors, not the customers) product in this arena is an amazing
challenge.

LibreOffice is a very important code base and taking it to mobile devices or
making it available in a business setting via web sockets as is being done
here, can provide some real value and makes it easy to deploy office software.

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mlinksva
More informative post about this from the lead LibreOffice developer
[https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-03-25-libreoffic...](https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-03-25-libreoffice-
icewarp.html)

~~~
cwyers
"Clearly it is necessary to intercept browser keystrokes, gestures and so on,
transport these over the websocket and emit them into the LibreOfficeKit
core."

So it sounds like it's similar to their earlier demos, where the client is
"thin" and the bulk of the work is done on the server, as opposed to being a
Javascript/HTML/CSS app that runs in the browser.

~~~
EmanueleAina
Yes, they are moving out of the server those pieces that benefits the most
from being client side (scrolling, cursor, selection) but the document
rendering/editing is still done by a LibreOfficeKit process on the server.

Reimplementing the whole LibreOffice in JS/CSS/HTML is totally another beast
(see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9263233](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9263233)
about WebODF).

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theandrewbailey
An online document editing suite is currently a big missing piece for a
complete private cloud system. I look forward to this.

~~~
oever
There are some private clouds that offer this, but the more the merrier. One
example is ownCloud Document, which uses WebODF to do collaborative editing.
[https://owncloud.org/features/](https://owncloud.org/features/)

~~~
theandrewbailey
I read a lot of OwnCloud horror stories on another HN thread about two weeks
ago. I'm going to try other servers, if only because I don't want PHP on my
server only for OwnCloud.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9206002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9206002)

~~~
dsp1234
I took a look at that thread, but it doesn't look to be about OwnCloud (it's
about alternatives to Evernote in general), and I only saw one subthread where
anything negative was said about OwnCloud.

Only two people said anything specific. One was about LDAP issues, and the
other was about "files missing", which I Googled and it appears to just be a
UI issue (the files dont' appear to be actually missing, just not indexed
after a rename+sync).

Is there a different thread that you meant to link to that had actual horror
stories about OwnCloud?

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benn_88
Excellent news! It's been great to see Collabora putting work into LibreOffice
and this will be an excellent step forward for the global use of open document
editors.

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MaximillianII
Down for me :-(

~~~
JonnieCache
Same for me. Here's a cache:
[https://archive.today/JmiPN](https://archive.today/JmiPN)

