Looking Back On a Year of LibreOffice

superapecommando writes "Simon Phipps, former head of open source at Sun and a backer of LibreOffice, looks at a tempestuous year for the OpenOffice fork. 'Once framed as an impetuous fork, LibreOffice has become the standard-bearer for the former OpenOffice community,' he says. 'It's far from perfect, of course. New open source projects never are and volunteer projects lack the corporate resources to make it look otherwise. But I have no doubt that it's working.'"

Comments

Java Not Required

[CritterNYC]

Java is only used for the Base database utility and a number of new document wizards plus a few other minor bits. The rest of LibreOffice has no Java components, so Java has nothing to do with normal usage of the word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool or drawing programs. Ribbon use is subjective. Like many others, I hate it. It's clumsy and harder to find what you need.

Re:Java Not Required

[Nutria]

A year ago

How ironic that CritterNYC said that "The rest of LibreOffice has no Java components", you complain about OpenOffice.org from one year ago and this topic is on the of LibreOffice.

Your FAIL is Big, Fat, Hairy and smells like Stupid.

Re:Java?

[MechaStreisand]

The problem is generally that Java applications become huge and bloated because the language is so verbose and inexpressive. See Steve Yegge's essay on the topic.

Re:Java?

[Yosho]

Is there anyone who incorporates Java into a major desktop application and (in terms of performance) does it well?

The problem here isn't with Java, it's with Swing (Java's native GUI toolkit). Swing is terribly slow. Applications written in Java with another toolkit, such as SWT or Qt, are fine. Azureus, for example, is a fairly popular BitTorrent client that is written in Java/SWT. (to be fair, the application itself is pretty bloated, but that has little to do with Java and more to do with the developers cramming in every feature under the sun)

Re:Java?

[StormyMonday]

As others have pointed out, the main Java GUI (SWING) is a real pig. This is a result of Java's "compile once, run anywhere" philosophy colliding with different OS GUIs.

The other problem is that Java's startup time is ridiculous. Load the VM, load the code, load the libraries (*lots* of libraries!), verify the libraries and the code, initialize the libraries (lots of .properties files!) and the code, and then run.

Once the startup hooplah is over, Java code is quite reasonably fast. Benchmarks either minimize the startup time by, say, running 10,000 iterations of a loop, or eliminating it entirely by using "flying start" techniques.