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NeoOffice/J 1.1 Finally In Beta

Posted by timothy on from the open-goodness dept.

VValdo writes "Hot on the heels of yesterday's vigorous debate re OpenOffice.org for OS X, the 1.1 beta of NeoOffice/J is now available. Based on Oo.o 1.1.3, improvements include native Mac menus, scroll wheel support, text drag-and-drop, smaller PDFs, new icons, localization for 40 languages, automatic update notification, and much more. No X11 server required!"

4 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. 98.8% C++, less then 1% Java by soullessbastard · · Score: 4, Informative

    Don't forget that OpenOffice.org itself is huge, and it is a C++ application. It's actually a beautiful example of how horridly slow C++ can get, both running and compiling. NeoOffice/J is just OpenOffice.org with some extensions.

    I did a line count analysis a while back in response to some FUD spreading, but it's probably still roughly accurate. On a source code level, less then 2% of NeoOffice/J is actually Java. 98% of the code is straight from OpenOffice.org. And not all of the NeoOffice/J code is in Java, so the actual figure is probably less then that.

    On a binary level, the size of the combined JAR files for NeoOffice/J and OpenOffice.org are only 3.7 MB of the application's 317 MB footprint. And those JAR files include the support OOo has for Java applets, DocBook filters, and the like. The "Java" magic NeoOffice/J adds to OpenOffice.org is essentially contained in a single file "vcl.jar", which is 70k. I'm sure someone can do those percentages themselves as I left my RPN calculator at home ;)

    ed

  2. Why we used J over C by soullessbastard · · Score: 4, Informative

    At one point in antiquity, both J and C were prototypes. C was really a hack to explore technologies, but J was engineered a bit more carefully. The idea was eventually that OOo X11 would yield to the short-term solution of J to the long term solution of C.

    Unfortunately, Cocoa was just too difficult to fit to the OOo event model. While I hacked and struggled with Cocoa until he smote my ruin upon the mountainside, the Java+Carbon of J the amazing engineering of Patrick and his testing crew was triumphant and created a stable, functional app. When it comes down to it, redoing all that work in Cocoa is just reinventing the wheel for no tangible benefit aside from pure geek thrills. Even if done, the result still wouldn't be using ObjC, Interface Builder, or any of the other tools that make Cocoa so scrumptious. It'd be the penultimate Cocoa hack job. Doing OOo in Cocoa is kind of like trying to ram a square peg into a round hole. Cocoa suffers from the fatal flaw of all framework technologies; they really don't work well for building apps that are not engineered to conform to the framework design.

    Frustrated with Cocoa, the decision I came to was to shelve C for a while and go join Patrick and help him bring Aqua into J, stop splitting our efforts, and combine to make a kickass app. Thus the Aqua menus were born with the other widgets to come. Eventually when J is finished, I am hoping to find time to take the "core" parts of J out and wrap them into a framework that can then be embedded into Cocoa apps, similar to the Gecko engine. That's a long way off yet...

    For more of my own logic read a more detailed discussion about why J is the best engineering choice for now.

    ed

  3. Re:No Word 5.1 compatibility? by soullessbastard · · Score: 4, Informative

    Unfortunately that file format hasn't been reverse engineered yet. We're not focusing on doing the reverse file format engineering ourselves. We just don't have the resources (two programmers!) to focus on the old Mac file formats, or even the new Mac file formats like Keynote. I wrote some design specs to get developers started if you're curious, but I haven't had the time to do engineering for those features.

    The only "old school" Mac app that has had its format engineered is the old Mac WordPerfect, thanks to the OOo WordPerfect filter team. They integrated their code into NeoOffice/J and now we can sort of open the old Novell/Corel WordPerfect 3.5 formatted files. Note this still doesn't give you "show codes", just the files. I think the old MacLink Plus may have had a Word 5.1 to WP translator, though, so that might be a way to get at your legacy docs even if it is convoluted as all hell.

    ed

  4. BitTorrent download by soullessbastard · · Score: 4, Informative

    Although it's not on the main download page yet, we also do have a torrent available for the main installer:

    http://trinity.neooffice.org/torrents/NeoOfficeJ-1 .1_Beta.torrent

    There are only a couple of seeders right now, but if the mirrors slow to a crawl the torrent may be a better choice.

    ed