Slashdot Mirror
OpenOffice Could Soon Become Web-Based Apps
An anonymous reader writes "Via Linuxtoday.com, a message from the OpenOffice Dev mailing list in which a new company is introducing the GravityZoo OpenOffice porting project. The unusually named group aims to bring OpenOffice to the Internet as a series of online apps. 'When OpenOffice.org is GravityZood, it will become a suite of productivity applications that are always available, online, via a broad range of devices. It will be possible to share and collaborate in real-time, to switch from one device (e.g. a PC) to another (Mobile) device. There will also be no need to save data, because everything you produce is saved automatically on the network. There is no need to download, install or update, the latest version is just available and accessible from any GravityZoo enabled client.'"
GravityZoo is NOT, I repeat NOT converting OpenOffice into a webapp. I don't really want to detract from their idea, so I'll try to be succinct. Basically, GravityZoo has a special client that interacts with the application running on the server. The application on the server is always available, and autostores your data in a GravityZoo Object Storage database.
Supposedly, it's an actual conversion of the application to a networked form rather than a simple remote desktop concept. If I were to make a W.A.G. of the Day, I'd say they're probably going to bus the normal IPC communications over the network. Not revolutionary by itself, but possibly nice if they have a good framework.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I have an Axim, and its great for a lot of things. Calendar, tasks, note taking, note recording, some light web surfing. But document creation. No. Even using Powerpoint on it is just horrendous. I have no faith that these apps with be nearly as enjoyable across devices that are not desktops.
These guys seem cool and all, but dude, get a proofreadery
"distributing Data, Information and Intelligence. A development that should not be dependent upon the whimp of a few very affluant and powerfull entities."
http://www.gravityzoo.com/developers/openSource.p
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I like the internet, I use it an awful lot, but for most uses I cannot see needing an Office package to be online.
It will be nice as a compliment though for those very rare occasions.
liqbase
From www.gravityzoo.com: The GravityZoo Framework employs patent pending technology to achieve its goals. It can be divided into three major components, all fulfilling a special and important task:
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
As per "Open Source" at the GravityZoo website, [...]"this requires the involvement of a global community of Information Analysts, IT architects and Engineers from both the Open Source and Commercial environment. Open Source because to achieve an egalitarian development of tomorrow's information society requires the free flow of Data Information and Intelligence to those in need. Commercial because certain developments require upfront investments and thus risktaking, a step the Open Source community is not always willing or capable to take. In the latter case the risktaking should be rewarded by limiting the access on a for Pay basis.
It is therefore that The GravityZoo Company from day one decide to implement a Dual Licensing model.
More information about our Open Source projects and activities will be available at this page soon."
Until they clarify their licensing, I refuse to be interested, let alone excited.
There is also so far only a Windows client. They don't even have a beta for other platforms. So I'm not interested in that way, also.
Also: if it requires a special client, it is not (repeat not) a web-based app. I don't fucking care how it's delivered. The web is browsed with a web browser - see how that works?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm impressed by this letter to the OOo developers saying all the cool things this will do, at some point when it's released.
I'd like to take this time to announce my new patent-pending vaporware storage system, where you can download tomorrow's amazing software... tomorrow.
And there's this thing called VNC that seems to do the same thing (?)
...will it run in Firefox?
I seem to recall that Sun attempted to do this with Star Office a few years back.
They gave up on it after a while, most likely because (1.) it took more in the doing than they thought and (2.) the marketoplace didn't show the expected interest.
This has about a much chance of flying as your common or garden stone. Aside from the fact that the article appears to be fundamentally flawed who would really want this functionality? Networks are just too slow for this to really work well. Even dumb terminals have lag and they are generally connected via a high speed network with minimal hops. Factor in the Interweb and this is just another web 2.0 pipe dream. Why is there this obsession with putting everything on the network even when it's not suitable for it?
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
"Saved automatically on the network" On whose network? To me this says their network. Do you really want to save all those letters to clients or CVs or proposals for a contract on someone else's computer?
I bet this sounds great for people that make word processing packages. We all know who that is.
I was GravityZood last year...it was horrible. The...the nightmares! I...my...my wife left me, my therapist committed suicide, my dog *SOB* I can't talk about it any more. Run! RUN! While you still can!
"You will soon be more aware of your growing awareness." - My first recursive fortune cookie!
Another great Web 2.0 concept.
Some days I think the Web peaked at HTML 3.2.
I can't see how this is different to what you can do already with FreeNX, except that FreeNX is available now, and this is vapourware.
You appear to be under the mistaken assumption that you are a serious user.
But anyone who would use any part of microsoft office but excel and perhaps outlook is by definition not a serious user.
Powerpoint has support only for crap low resolutions. Word is a pathetic joke in terms of layout and typesetting ability and publisher frankly is not noticeably better. Access? Don't fucking get me started.
If you want to do a presentation that anyone is going to care about, you're producing a video, not a powerpoint presentation. If you're trying to create a document for external release, like advertising or documentation, neither word nor publisher can help you. You must use something real, like Framemaker, InDesign, et cetera.
Office is a sad, pathetic Joke. OO.o does everything that office does well, but not as well as office does it in some cases. But in terms of casual use of an office suite, which is all office is good for anyway (again, with the exception of excel, IMO Microsoft's only worthwhile program period full stop) there is simply nothing significant missing from OO.o.
Anything office does that OO.o doesn't, office does a horrible job with.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
What I'm looking forward to is a web-based version of Firefox.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Ok, we all kind of understand that there will come a time when bandwidth allows profile concepts to be moved to a universally accessible secure location. But it will have to be a highly secured and trusted service or user created server service. (i.e. A home BSD box or even Windows Home Server for example for home users.)
However, I don't want my personal documents stored on their servers, and I know most business policies will not allow documents to be stored in this manner.
Also, why are they 'reinventing' the wheel with patented technology to do this? There are many known and secure remote app technologies that could be already put into place for something like this.
I'm open to ideas here, but I don't see how this is 'Open' or a good thing...
What's the difference between this and what google is already doing? Except google's doing it for free.
Just what we need, another damn Java Crapplet.
It's the new "service" paradigm that people are trying to push.
No need to buy office, just rent it online.
Pretty soon, it will be "no need to buy a computer, just rent it, and pay by the CPU hour"
Well, guess what folks, I for one have a problem with that model.
1. Bandwidth is not there yet, it will not be there for quite a while
2. I'm already paying for bandwidth, now they want to make me pay for something that I can use, and pay AGAIN for downloading it?
3. Service guarentees, if my computer crashes, it's my own damn fault, if the net becomes unusable, who's to blame, can I use the excuse the net ate my homework?
4. People can't code to save their lives in regular applications, now using a DISTRIBUTED model, that is supposed to make things equal, or BETTER? yeah, right.
I don't know why they even call these services. When I pay for other services, I get things done. This is just another case of the open-source 'I can do it too'.
Although the title of this story is a little misleading, I should point out that it is possible for something like a web-based OpenOffice to come into existence.
OpenOffice is built using a retargetable GUI framework -- that's what allows it to work on both Windows and Linux without the need to resort to cheap and sleazy WINE tricks. So, theoretically at least, it's possible to build a front end to OpenOffice that targets the browser as a remote desktop.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I don't really see the utility of offering OpenOffice in various forms such as the web-frontend presumably discussed in the article (no I didn't RTFA). While OO.o appears to have most of the basics, some fundamental features are totally absent.
My personal pet peeve about openoffice is that it's almost impossible to play videos in a presentation. I spent a full day trying to instal the java media environment that is required to perform this task and never got even close. The workaround suggested by a document from the OO.o website was to use individual macros to play movies, but that was cumbersome and not really what I wanted to do.
I can appreciate that maybe the GravityZoo developers do not have this as their forte, but it seems like more work getting OO.o to a more polished state supersedes the goal of introducing web frontends (whose usefulness is questionable in the first place.
I just can't use a product associated with the name "GravityZoo." GravityZoo sounds too much like GravityGlue... which sounds too much like CavityGlue... which sounds just a little too close to CavityJew... which reminds me of the dentist (sorry for the anti-Semitism -- I needed this for the joke to work. I love you guys. Shalom!) Anyhoo, so... the dentist. I don't like the dentist, and so, logically, I don't like GravityZoo. QED.
sig: sauer
I don't care what some slashbots think of my level of intelligence. Some people will get more out of my comments than others. I'm okay with that.
The simple fact is that office doesn't cost too much for an actually useful application suite. But instead it's made up of a bunch of total crap. Word is fine for writing letters and such (Word -- write letters n' shit, yo) but useless for anything more, and publisher is just useless. It doesn't do anything significant that Word doesn't, it just has a different interface.
The fact that lots of people use office to turn out volumes of substandard work doesn't make it good software. It makes those people stupid.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I will refute your OO.o argument with one word:
Landscape.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I'm sick of the M$ fanboys. If you don't understand the open source model don't post dumb comments here. Go and start a blog where you can boast about all the cool VB.Net hacks you've discovered. Sell some crapware. Do what you want.
Too little, too late. I'm pretty sure that Google Docs is using OpenOffice code for a large portion of Google Docs functionality. (Take a look at the Google spreadsheets help and also note the producer tag on its pdf output.)
That said, any spreadsheet application needs to be able to perform regression and factor analysis at a minimum to be useful to me. Google Docs has no such advanced statistical functionality, Excel is satisfactory, and SYSTAT is preferred. Fancy formatting be damned, it's actual functionality that matters to me. Hell, a CLI is all that is really required; I started with MINITAB and SAS on a monochrome VAX/VMS connected terminal about 15 years ago, it worked just fine and little, if anything, since has improved on it. I'm betting it would not be too hard to turn VMS apps into web services...
If SSI ever does web-based applications then colour me interested.
I like landscapes. I have a nice view of one out of my front window. Lots of trees, and a Southern exposure.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So they're basically trying to reinvent X. Except X already works now, is tried and tested, and it doesn't need proprietary shit.
"Access? Don't fucking get me started"....sigh, why not get started, you did on most of the others.
I'm no fan of Office or of OO.o. Both are tools and as such open to personal opinion for their good and bad traits. However, when you slam something give me an alternative Ican review, test, and try as comparison. I've done well received presentation with Powerpoint. Not many have the time to create "video", not does video work for a teaching or instructional medium.
Do you know of a better tool then powerpoint that is simple to use, costs little, allows high res images, and wont take forever to create a result? Not busting, that is a serious question. Same thing with Word or Publisher. Cite other tools and I'll taste test to see if I have the same view.
Telling me it sucsk is only half the job, tell me the better solution and why; that give more cred to the statements.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
Somebody has found a way to make OpenOffice slower! I am in awe.
Read my blog.
Don't we pretty much have this with think free?
Gravity Zoo is very promising, i can think of many applications that could be enhanced by it (OO included, imagine it in a corporate environment), but it is not there yet. It is between proof of concept and betas. Lots to be done before i can really think about including it in a production environment. Congratulations and best of luck to the Gravity Zoo people.
moi
To be honest, I haven't used Impress, but it doesn't seem to be much harder to use, and I know it supports higher resolutions.
In the interest of full disclosure, everything I know about Impress is second-hand. If I wanted to create a presentation I'd use Scala InfoChannel Designer (it being the easiest way I have to create video presentations.)
Word, again, is for writing letters and memos. OO.o Writer does everything that you SHOULD be doing with Word.
You can replace publisher with Scribus, which I've actually tested out a few times, replicating jobs I've done in InDesign. It's not quite as easy to use but InDesign is missing some extremely obvious features itself (like autonumbering of figures or indeed anything but pages, the ability to flow text into automatically created new pages with multiple master text frames, and a number of other basic items) so you probably wouldn't feel like you were missing anything anyway. For actual work, I use InDesign CS2 at the moment, which costs money. But Scribus is really quite good.
The one thing I'm missing in Free software land, actually, is a vector graphics program with decent EPS support so I can interoperate with Illustrator users. Also I have to say the printing system is ballocks. I have SERIOUS problems with printing being offset down the page and such. I'm not very impressed with CUPS, and I've been using it since it was relatively new. It's a huge pain in my ass. Not that the state of printing on Linux was all that hot before... It was surely worse.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You'll be amazed what you can get LaTeX to do with the right packages installed. It is about as complex as HTML, and of course free. I have seen perfectly good presentations made using it, as well.
I've seen a couple of people mention problems with getting directories to line up correctly, but there are complete distributions which have decent documentation on this sort of thing.
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
yes, word is fine for writing letters and such. This is its intended purpose, and for that purpose, it is better than OO.o. It is not inDesign or XPress or Framemaker, and if you try to use it as such, you will fall shrot, but as a program for producing documents, specifications, legal documents, etc. and at this it is great. It may not be the best of breed, I have not tried every word processor, but I have tried OO.o and word is much better. I agree that Excel simply can not be beaten. Microsoft has done this one right. Publsiher, I agree is atrocious. It is Pagemaker 5, at best. Outlook works. It has issues, but as far as a completely integrated calendar, schedule management and email client, it works. Access..... what can we say about Access.... if you are a database guy, you will hate it. Its non standard SQL implementation, seems to enforce bad habits, but if you are not a database guy, Access works. Its simple and can handle databases larger than the average person will ever have need of, all with visual design, query building and reporting tools. Its not fantastic, but it works, and for its target market, it works quite well. I won't go into Powerpoint because I think that all software of its type is worthless. If you want to have a meeting with me, I'll sit down and we can talk. If there are complicated issues, send me and email with bullet points and I will read it before I show up, Powerpoint presentions are nothing more than masterbatory exercises for those with way too much time. You can bash Microsoft for Windows, quite rightly, but Office is worth the money. It performs well in most circumstances. It is when people try to use it for things it was not designed for that things go bad. (like using word to design web pages, or to do typetting, or trying to use excel as a database, or even attempting to use Access as a networked database)
Ok, it seems to me that the single biggest draw for these online desktop-like apps is to have access to your files from anywhere. Assuming that is correct, they why aren't we seeing more traditional apps that are capable of drawing from a common network data store such as Amazone S3? I know Amazon provides an API. Seem like you could extend OpenOffice to talk to S3 (or similar) directly and you'd have your "documents just about anywhere" feature that everyone (on Slashdot) seems to think is so useful. Really, it is such a relatively simple solution considering compared to trying to coerce a web browser into doing things God never meant it to do.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
you anti-dentine
next time you will be saying they should go to special schools
There is absolutely a big market for this. That is what 37signals and Google, among others, are proving with their web apps.
The benefits of web office apps are many and great. I do not intend to discuss them here, since it is too long a topic. For instance, the same site links to a very interesting article on the subject.
What is holding this evolution of the systems right now are the genuine security and confidentiality concerns from managers and sysadmins. As many stated, most companies will not trust their data to servers that leave a minimum possibility for security breaches. That is what makes Google Apps (and the likes) not a viable option for many.
I do not yet clearly understand the goals of this project, but I hope they intend to make the resulting applications open source, and easy to install.
One project with that goal in mind is OpenGoo, with which I am involved. What the project intends is to form a community from existing open source project members to leverage their work in the pursuit of this ambitious goal that we believe can not be achieved by one single OS project alone.
Please contact me if you want to get involved or have any ideas or suggestions for the project.
MeTheGeek
I agree with you totally about the public internet, but in a business environment with local servers, 'hosted apps' makes a lot of sense.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Sun wants or tryies to kill W3C.
Now that's an oxymoron if there ever was one.
I have a laptop and use OO. I like the ability to write when I don't have the internet. It uses less energy to do so, and doesn't mandate the connection. All my docs are local and backed up on other media.
Put simply, this offers no advantage to my current configuration, which everyone else in America worth a damn already has.
No thanks!
I prefer to dictate to Cowboy Neal.
I don't care what anyone says ... nothing beats a web-based operating system ;)
Congratulations to the guerrilla marketing exec that got a few thousand FOSS coders to look at a brand new product with no demo applications. Brilliant!
Um. Apple uses CUPS in Mac OS X, so that sounds like it must be some sort of a configuration issue. It's certainly never happened to me. But, driver support is such that I've always used good ol' sneaker net for my printing. And when I have been able to almost get it to work, it's always seemed quite flaky. So I'll generally agree with you, but your problem must have some resolution...
Look out!
As a *nix user who loathes Microsoft in general and Office in particular, but who also owns a Tablet PC (which only really works well in Windows) and frequently takes notes in class, I have one word for you:
OneNote.
I couldn't care less about Word, PowerPoint, or even Excel (except in the rare occasion I have to make a bar chart with "whiskers," which OO.o Chart can't do), but my demo copy of OneNote is so wonderful I'm actually considering buying the student version of Office (which, if you knew me, would make you wonder if I'd been replaced by a pod person).
If only OO.o had an equivalent...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
it's anti-dentite, DENTITE!, you cock-gumming faggot
Putting a web app front-end on Open Office makes good sense, especially if the application server is already in your pocket. We currently tote around several electronic gadgets, and yet can only access "serious" applications through stationary desktops and bulky laptops. As electronics shrink, all of this must converge to a single platform. Since pretty much all applications require comms, and mobile phones provide this, they will probably end up being the platform that we converge onto. They will carry the files we're currently working with, like a level 1 cache, and swap out the ones we haven't touched for some time to server farms. They will give us dinky interfaces into their apps while we're on the move. When we need the big screen experience, they will deliver their apps to ubiquitous, big screen docking stations (a.k.a. browsers) via local wireless. So we will need to web-enable most of our important apps over time. See http://trevors-trinkets.blogspot.com/2007/02/after -desktop-what.html and http://trevors-trinkets.blogspot.com/2007/03/mobil izing-mobiles.html for how.
... of masking its appalling performance.
At least TiVo just stops you from running modified software on their hardware, what these guys will be doing is attempt to circumvent the LGPL by interfacing an LGPL server program using a proprietary client, thus by not distributing it they are not bound by the LGPL. Of course, LGPL programs are not the only ones vulnerable to this. Even the GPLv3 will run into problems with it. The Affero approach won't solve the problem because it will be a hassle for many free software developers, and quite frankly, it is non-free as it doesn't allow you to modify all parts of the program. I am worried that if more company's start to do this kind of thing there will be no other solution than to stick in a use-restriction. I.e, "if you let people interface the program over a network, you must make your changes public". Yes, use restrictions are very bad, but unfortunately it seems as if they might end up being necessary. I pray that these applications will turn out to be a big enough fiasco for people not to use them.
...when it was called ThinkFree Online. Oh wait, we have to hate ThinkFree because it's written in Java. Even though it works well, lets you use your own fonts and printer, opens and saves real MS Office docs, and installs into the JVM cache faster than an MS Office or OpenOffice install.
Oh well, trying to write an Office suite in Ajax has kept people busy for a few years, now they can try to get the native OO.o app working in a browser. Maybe next we can port it to Flash. That'll be fun.
GravityZoo just posted a reaction on their blog regarding the OOo porting project.
The one thing I'm missing in Free software land, actually, is a vector graphics program with decent EPS support so I can interoperate with Illustrator users
I do not know if you are going to read this (as this story is quite old) but I use OpenOffice Draw to create EPS files from anything you can put there (it is vector based but you can also insert raster images). I use it mainly to export raster images (jpg, png, etc) to EPS to use in Latex documents (THE way documents should be written).
You just have to select the objects you want to export to EPS and then click the menu FILE and then EXPORT (note, not export to pdf, just EXPORT) and select the EPS extension.
hth
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
But what about opening existing EPS, such as from illustrator?
Even just going between different versions of illustrator I get errors like "unknown shading type encountered".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"