Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Today we release an easy way to get stuck into playing with LibreOffice online alongside ownCloud - please do checkout the CODE page and have a play. The purpose of my blog here is to credit the people involved in the development so far: currently all of the core work is by Collabora - that's something we hope that making it easier to get involved will improve.

Some background

The history of the code we're showing today goes a long way back, but the specific pieces necessary for this work are rather newer. The initial work done around adapting LibreOfficeKit to implement tiled viewing of documents (for Android) whereby LibreOffice provides a simple API to produce pixels from abstract document regions was implemented by a Smoose and Collabora partnership.

Follow-on work to get basic editing functionality exposed via the LibreOfficeKit API was funded by The Document Foundation - which enabled basic editing on Android.

Then, after a hiatus, IceWarp weighed in and invested in the implementation of LibreOffice Online with Collabora; huge cudos to them. Its great to work alongside them.

Naturally a fundamental piece of bringing LibreOffice to the web, is LibreOffice itself. Many thanks to all those who have contributed to making it the success it is today.

Hard work from many Collaborans

Having credited those funding and investing in the work alongside Collabora, its well worth calling out the engineers that put their sweat and tears (hopefully no blood) into the work. Splitting down who did what here is somewhat complicated, since there are four main pieces, and some of the work overlaps several of these, but lets try; unless stated all the work is from Collabora:

Web Services Daemon

The initial bootstrapping and creation of the fundamental pieces here: The initial creation of the webservice daemon, socket connection management (Tor Lillqvist)
Tile cache (Tor Lillqvist)
Save As (Tor Lillqvist)
lokitclient test app (Tor Lillqvist)
chroot build scripts & debugging (Tor Lillqvist, Jan Holesovsky)
Pre-forking support for session processes (Tor Lillqvist)
Web Service Daemon HTTP POST API "convert-to" for arbitrary document-conversion (Miklos Vajna)
Initial testing framework (Miklos Vajna)
Improved capability management (Tor Lillqvist)
OS/X prototype port (Tor Lillqvist)
Tile invalidation & cache management (Tor Lillqvist)
systemd service descriptions (Tor Lillqvist)
Two-level tile cache (Jan Holesovsky)
Debugging tooling (Tor Lillqvist, Henry Castro)
Return results from UNO commands (Jan Holesovsky)
MessageQueue profiling and time-stamping (Jan Holesovsky)
Fixes for new Cairo format basebmp (Caolán McNamara of RedHat)
Signal handling & graceful shutdown (Henry Castro)

LibreOfficeKit

This API is provided by the LibreOffice core, and is used by both Android, LibreOffice Online, and GNOME Documents to do both tiled rendering and adding editing support.

Writer tiled rendering (Jan Holesovsky, Tor Lillqvist)
Impress tiled rendering (Andrzej Hunt)
Calc tiled rendering (Kohei Yoshida, Jan Holesovsky, Henry Castro)
Writer and Impress tiled editing (Miklos Vajna)
Calc tiled editing (Jan Holesovsky, Henry Castro)
UNO command arguments handling: JSON to property values (Miklos Vajna)
Writer tiled rendering of comments/postits/annotations (Miklos Vajna)
Make LibreOfficeKit work with libmerged (Matus Kukan)

JavaScript / leaflet

Initial adaptation of Leaflet library, and integration with Web Services daemon, adding Web Socket support to fetch tiles, unwinding tile interleaving issues, making NodeJS usable for humans and other bootstrapping (Mihai Varga)
Adapting zoom, implementing scrollbars (Mihai Varga)
Selection rendering, and shape outlines (Mihai Varga)
Search bar, in-document highlighting (Mihai Varga)
Clipboard paste (Miklos Vajna)
Fixes for image resizing, keyboard shortcuts and toolbars (László Németh)
Remove tile fading animation (Henry Castro)
Keypress and keycode conversion and capture (Henry Castro, Mihai Varga)
Tile creation timing and cancellation (Kendy)
Lots of linting cleanup (Mihai Varga)
Toolbar implementation, and command-state synchronization (Mihai Varga)
Style and font attribute selector (Mihai Varga)
Clipboard / text copy pieces (Mihai Varga)
Pre-fetching during editing only when idle (Mihai Varga)
TileBench benchmark, test (Mihai Varga)
Re-establish broken connections (Henry Castro)
Print handling (Mihai Varga)
Full-screen slideshow mode (Mihai Varga)
Insert file handler (Mihai Varga)
Undo & Redo pieces (Miklos Vajna)
Selection extension and dragging (Andrzej Hunt)
Misc. keyboard shortcuts (Laszlo Nemeth)
Spreadsheet tabs & slide previews (Mihai Varga)

Shared front-end / backend bits

There are some chunks of work that are sufficiently wide-ranging that they involve significant work in both the client Javascript, and the LibreOfficeKit implementation, as well as touching the Web Services Daemon.

Calc Row/Column header rendering (Andrzej Hunt, Henry Castro, Miklos Vajna)
Packaging, Testing Virtual Machine Image build etc. (Andras Timar)
Manual testing (Olivier Hallot)
Part (eg. slide, sheet) annotations and API (Mihai Varga, Tor Lillqvist)
downloadAs conversion API for printing, save-as etc. (Mihai Varga)
Font preview rendering (Mihai Varga)
Mouse event queueing and capture and synthesis (Mihai Varga, Andrzej Hunt)
Spreadsheet formula-bar (Mihai Varga)
Search all; API to return all hits for a search (Mihai Varga)
Alpha transparent document rendering work (Miklos Vajna)

OwnCloud integration

Original ownCloud Documents plugin - which is the lion's share of the work here is thanks to a number of ownCloud developers (Frank Karlitschek, Victor Dubiniuk, Jörn Friedrich Dreyer, Thomas Müller, Jan-Christoph Borchardt at ownCloud; Tobias Hintze, Friedrich Kossebau of KO gmbh)
Initial port to LibreOffice Online (Jan Holesovsky)
Security policy (Henry Castro)
URL management (Hentry Castro)
Document loading via ownCloud (Jan Holesovsky)
Cleanup, and remove unused pieces (Henry Castro)
Improve New Document handling (Jan Holesovsky)
Extend file-types handled (Mihai Varga)
Implement saving (Jan Holesovsky)
Use pdf.js for PDFs for now (Andras Timar)

Thanks again to all of our engineers who made this happen, and to all those whose work we built it upon.

Conclusion

CODE, as is true of all Free Software, builds heavily on previous work done by many. Having said that, Collabora through the skill and dedication of our engineers, have clearly contributed huge amounts of expertise and effort to architect and implement this exciting new development in Cloud based productivity. We thank all our partners and customers who have worked alongside us to enable that. To play with it now and get involved please checkout the CODE.

My content in this blog and associated images / data under images/ and data/ directories are (usually) created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0 license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes / improvements / corrections by private mail.

In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE, Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International), or anyone else. It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy. Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences or fun.