It's very nice to see funding for this LibreOffice initiative. From personal experience, developing WebODF (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.
"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.
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.
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/
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.
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?
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.
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.