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Java Developer Says He Built, Launched Basic Open Source Office Suite In 30 Days
alphadogg writes "A freelance Java developer claims it took him only 30 days to build and launch a basic open source office suite that runs on multiple OSes. Called Joeffice, it works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux as well as in browsers, according to the developer, Anthony Goubard. It includes a very basic word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation program and database software, Goubard said. The office suite was built with NetBeans and uses many popular open source Java libraries. That allowed him to built the program in 30 days, he said, a process that he documented daily on YouTube (video). The suite was released as an alpha version, which means that not everything works yet. Goubard's Amsterdam company, Japplis, launched the suite, which is available under an Apache 2.0 license. This license allows companies to change and redistribute the code internally without having to share the new code publicly, he said."
That's proof he is lying. Even the developer's of netbeans don't use netbeans.
I built a video game in 48 hours. Well ok it is not a AAA title. It is a tron clone. But who cares, lets just not precise this and everybody will think that I rewrote Crysis 3.
Crysis 3 played like it was written in 48 hours.
Be seeing you...
What? You say that an application developed in 30 days is not as good as one developed in 30 years? Heretic!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That's because Facebook wasn't written in Java. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
This, so much this.The question is not 'can you build an Office suite in 30 days', the question is, how much functionality can you deliver in 30 days, keeping it consistent, extensible and maintainable? Surely, I can build "Photoshop" in 30 days, even make it look the same. But will it be valuable software and an improvement over previous iterations? Deploy this kind of software in a large organization and watch hell unleash. This article says more about the ego of the developer.
Office was got as near as possible to perfection in about 17 years then they spent 13 years making it worse and worse. The current version is only slightly preferable to being buggered with a cactus
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
#include
void main() {
printf("Basic office suite\n");
}
As you can see, it was possible to program this office suite so quickly because I used libraries. Note: this is an alpha release and some features aren't finished yet.
Quite an analogy, no pun intended. I think everyone needs to realise that some things reach a peak of maximum functionality and then can't be improved upon no matter how much you want/need to sell the next generation office suite. Business requirements are usually standardised, unchanging, and not terribly exotic. Fix bugs, speed the code up, add functions if really required, that's it.
Claims to have built an office suite in 30 days, but it is only an alpha and not everything works. Well how much is not everything? It is just a bunch of nice splash screens?
If you can get to 'alpha' stage in 30 days, how many years is that to a 1.0 release?
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
He assembled components together in 30 days. He can't get from those components to a competitive product, he would need to rewrite each of those netbeans to bring the functionality up to the level of the competitors in order to actually make an Office Suite.
But as a way to show off Java as a development environment that's good.
But a Microsoft guy could do the same, dropping in a load of stock rich text edits and grid controls to product a very similar quickly.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main() {
printf("Basic office suite\n");
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}
Thanks FSM for Free Software, otherwise I couldn't have fixed your bugs.
As you can see, it was possible to program this office suite so quickly because I used libraries. Note: this is an alpha release and some features aren't finished yet.
Can I join the developer team? Hopefully we can finish the program quicker, if we double the dev.-team.
I assure you that not many companies allow you to touch anything GPL even with 10-foot pole. I work for big company (150k+ employees) and there is a blank ban on touching any GPL code ever for internal development.
Internal redistribution or not, there is always a chance that you may want to give some variation of the software to client/subsidiary company/whatever - and opening source at this moment (which might be linked to some in-house prioprietary libraries in meantime) is just not worth the effort.
This dude is just trying to get himself attention and Slashdot is obliging. I mean for one, building an "office suite" is not necessarily impressive. All that office suite actually means is a program that does word processing, spreadsheets, maybe presentations. Well, there can be a great range in that. High end office suites, like Microsoft Office, do a whole lot of complex shit and do it well, and has a bunch of well built tools (like a spell checker and so on). However a crap office suite might do little more than you'd get out of Wordpad and SSS.
Then there's the fact that "alpha" has traditionally meant in software "feature incomplete, still under heavy development." These days given that beta often seems to mean that (it used to mean feature complete, working on bugs) alpha might mean "Well, it complies now and runs sometimes!"
It would not be very hard to set a rather low goal for what constitutes an "office suite," bash the basis of that out, and then call it an alpha. I can't try it, since I do not care to install Java on my system, but looking at the screen shots, it looks like he did precisely that. It looks exceedingly simple, largely using a bunch of the built in Java controls. That's fine and all, but I don't find that really that impressive for 30 days of work. Part of the point of managed languages like Java, C#, that kind of thing it to be able to bash together something basic pretty quick.
So ya, I'm voting that he's just publicity whoring. If he wants to call us back when 1.0 comes out, then I'll have a look. Maybe then it'll be something cool, but I kinda doubt it. Personally I'd stick to MS Office, Google Docs, Libre Office, or whatever your current preferred suite is.
You needed 3 minutes to write that code?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The current version is only slightly preferable to being buggered with a cactus
They call that a ribbon now.
Where does that stupidity stem from? I'd like to know.
The Open Source community. Apart from the enlightened few, it's long on zealots and short on knowledge
"it took him only 30 days to build and launch a basic open source office" and "The suite was released as an alpha version" mean's he's got the 80 (visible) percent done that take 20 percent of the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
I wish people wouldn't get headlines with this sort of claim. It helps push the entire profession towards cutting corner in order to under bid each other, which does not speak well for the quality of future software.
Speak instead of prototyping. That's much closer to the truth.
Because end users won't give a damn about how much time did it take to build, or whether it's opensource. The only thing that matters to them is whether it's better than the existing ones.
No, its just usual to have even good developers licensing somtheing under a license without having read and understood these or other licenses.
The top misunderstanding is actually the one about the GPL mandatign you to publish the source code openly, which lies at the heart of the "Softwar as a service" problem.
To state that clearly: The only thing the GPL mandates is what you should give to the people to whom you give your software product. The GPL is designed for the freedom of the user (or customer), not the intellectual property protection of the programmer or as socialistic "software mus be open for everybody". If you distribute a product inside a company, the person you are distributing it to will have certain rights *as a part of the company*. However there is nothing wrong with a company rule which does not allow him to exercise these rights, like confidentiality agreements. Currently i am working for a company where the GPL is blacklisted due to that misunderstanding.
Then it took 3 weeks to open the first hello world document.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Completely true. I used to work for a very large company of > 150k employees who decreed that we wouldn't be allowed to touch certain types of Open Source software with a 10-foot pole, completely missing the fact that their entire line of copier products was based on Linux...
There was a complete disconnect between the PHB-side of the business and R,D&E.
Not really - the code running the copier was pretty much useless without the copier; and few companies have the manufacturing ability to build copiers. Releasing the code isn't going to impact them competitively so it makes sense to use GPL'd code if it works and is cheaper than rolling your own. On the other hand, using GPL'd code in a stand alone document management system that runs on someone else's widely available hardware would not make sense; because any competitor could then resell your code without the investment in developing it and potentially undercut your pricing.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Even the article noted it doesn't work, being alpha code.
This is too much like all those crummy half-baked Kxxxx apps that come with KDE, and they're a huge waste of download time and disk-space too.
So can we just stop wasting our time with all this and ignore it until and unless there are some in-depth reviews that come up positive *and* that give a good reason to choose whatever this is over existing software?
Perhaps as an exercise if people think they can do better in other languages then by all means lets have a Slashdot "Office-A-Thon" of sorts to see who builds what in 30 days. Certainly beats sitting around a /. post grumbling at a guy who put some time and effort in his off time to do something and wither or not this is /. worthy.
/. set aside a section that lets you see a summary of people's progress on that challenge.
Get your nerd on and lets see other people build something better in 30 days solo. Be nice if
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
There ain't too many zealots that follow ESR. If you were talking about RMS, he'd take umbrage at your referring to his followers as the 'Open Source' community. Liberated software, or as they prefer it, libre-software, is more like it.
To answer the GP, part of the reason is around GPL3. Linux is well understood to be GPL2, so while GPL2 was the norm, it wasn't a major showstopper. But once GPL3 came along, w/ its patent termination clauses, its 'anti-Tivoization' clauses and so on, it was rightly perceived as being hostile to business. So guess what, businesses became more hostile to it. Also, enough lawyers have come to a consensus that using GPL3 would open a can of worms as far as company practices go, and hence the ban on GPL software in offices.
Abies above hit the nail right on the head. There is always a chance that one may want to give some variation of the software to a client/subsidiary, and that's where the differences b/w copyleft licenses and others kick in. With BSD, they wouldn't need to bother about any implied obligations incurred as a result of the redistribution. With GPL, they absolutely would. The reason not too many worry about Linux is that not many, aside from say router designers would worry about tampering w/ that code. But any application software that is GPL is another story altogether.
It's quite simple really.
1) FSF's position on dynamic linking is retarded
2) A large corporation consists of multiple legal entities. It's not difficult to trigger "distribution".
3) If any "distribution" doesn't abide by the terms of the GPL, even when to a wholly-owned subsidiary, the organization could lose all rights under the GPL.
4) Therefore it may have to "include" source code for an entire application + vendor libraries
5) It literally won't be able to, since it may not own all of them, or some may be extremely commercially sensitive.
6) an individual developer, manager or department head can't just decide to commit a large corporation - that's why they have legal
7) Whatever a dev know about licenses won't accurately transmit to legal anyway
8) None of this stuff has been tested in court. "Making sense" or "I think" isn't enough.
Linux won't count for primarily three reasons
9) vendor distributions - if there's a problem with closed source binary drivers, practically speaking they'd have to take out Oracle, RH, SUSE first
10) the GPL specifically excludes use of e.g. common OS APIs in dynamic linking, so applications a firm distributes internally can stay closed, as long as they don't add anything GPL that is NOT part of the OS
11) There's probably nothing of real value that they add to e.g. Linux anyway. Do you want to see thousands of poxy scripts added to configure up the HTTP proxy and new hostname generation in every large enterprise?
If you'd actually listen to those warnings, you'd realise they're against Java browser plugin, not JRE or Java itself.
It's too bad you posted as AC. Your post should have more visibility because you're right. The number of posts pointing out the Pareto Principle, as if nobody here has ever heard of it, is maddening.
To follow up, what's with all the GPL bashing calling it socialistic and that companies are afraid if one guy contributes a few lines of gpl code supposedly making the whole project gpl? (hint, it doesn't, and the reverse doesn't work that way either).
What the fuck, Slashdot? It seems that if Linus Torvalds came out with his first kernel today and got a story posted on slashdot, all he'd get would be flames.
--
BMO
Also, enough lawyers have come to a consensus that using GPL3 would open a can of worms as far as company practices go, and hence the ban on GPL software in offices.
This is the key element in regards to the business decision. The Lawyers are advising against it due to potential legal issues. Hell I've asked a local lawyer about GPL and Open Source and was advised not to create any internal software using it due to the potential and from the SoHo/Small business owner perspective, it's simply not worth the potential legal issues. Stick with the BSD/Apache license and you're fine.
IAMNAL and this isn't legal advice. That's to see a lawyer and pay for his advice. Don't believe everything you see online.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
First of all congratulations on the achievement. However it doesn't quite have a practical use. I mean office software in general is fairly useless, you type a document, you print it, maybe you export it to PDF, but that's just about it. It's a slightly smarter typewriter. Spreadsheet software seems interesting at first sight, until you realize that having more than a screen full of cells makes it harder than just writing a little program to solve your problem.
Yes, but at one point the PHBs told us not to USE any GPL v3 code at all (even as tools when working on other software) because they'd got it into their thick little skulls that it "infects" all the code it "touches."
Stick Men
You needed 3 minutes to write that code?
He included the time it took him to pour a cup of coffee. Everyone knows that coders cant write without caffeine.... (grin)
I remember something very similar being done with VB controls in the 1990s. I bought a package at Books-A-Million that was just a wrapper around a full-functional spreadsheet control implemented as a VBX. I wish I could remember the name of it! I can see it on a sale table with a lot of other software. Those were the good old days.
If it "uses many popular open source Java libraries" it would be easy to put them together. I know there are classes that read and write Excel files and probably others. I guess there are spreadsheet controls, rich text controls, etc. Good example of MVC component use. Use a component to read file into M, and use components as V, leaving C to basically direct traffic. So component software is a reality, especially in Java where you don't have inter-language barriers.
A big win for code reuse. Probably zero people care about this suite, but a lot of people want to have Excel versions of data in your model and you can throw it in easily.
You are correct in all your points.
You are, however, missing one: The philosophy of the FSF.
These guys are about software freedom, not about having the largest possible market share. They literally don't care if an important part of the license is problematic for large corporations. As a metaphor, I'm sure you can easily adapt your list to the issue of slavery/emancipation. That wasn't a reason to not do it.
I'm with the FSF on that issue. Large corporations can get something worth many thousands EUR/US$ for free if and only if they are willing to accept the responsibilities that come with it. If they don't like it, they can buy or write their own software.
These are not very high barriers. Many corporations, including most of the Fortune 500, do use Free Software extensively. Quite frankly, most of the team it's just legal being conservative (I don't blame them, it's practically part of their job description to be that way) and not wanting to get into all the tricky details of what that means and how it changes the contracts with, say, the contractors that work on it.
I don't think the goal of Free Software should be to move aside and make commercial compatability be a driving force. That's one of the moves that I dislike about the Open Source rebranding. Freedom and capitalism have a tricky relationship, and they are as much enemies as they are friends. The relationship is only positive for the freedom part if you keep a careful distance - not too far away, but not too close, either.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This sounds like an ideal case to use python, and possibly also the programming language.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
I'm sure companies such as Boeing, Oracle and Citibank wholeheartedly agree with this point of view.
I'm not. I also work for a big multinational, and there is absolutely no problem using GPL'ed tools. There was recently a question from the legal dept. about whether we had any FOSS licensed code in our project (surprisingly we didn't), but it didn't seem as though there was a ban on things like BSD licensed stuff or whatever (GPL obviously). I don't know whether checking this made sense (some schmucks might be putting GPL'ed code in) or just the legal dept. trying to justify their existence. The company also uses embedded Linux in a number of projects that are otherwise not FOSS. All above board w.r.t. the GPL. Probably needs an ok from legal or something, but definitely not banned.
To that extent, the GPL is working well, but the main barrier is "dynamic linking" seems not only unnecessary, but goes against most developer's notions that dynamically linking to a library doesn't form a combined single product (hence the vague twaddle about "common OS components", not least since the GNU project couldn't have got started if that had been imposed by the then UNIX vendors).
Well, they created the LGPL to cover that angle, and the developer can decide if his work should carry the GPL or the LGPL, so I don't see what all the fuss is about. If I write a library and pick the GPL as its license, than I'm making a clear statement that I don't want my lib to be part of any non-GPL distributed code.
If you don't like it, nobody forces you to use my code. :-)
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Seriously? When you start with NetBeans as your base platform, you've already got a word processor built in. You've already done most of the work, for the presentation and spreadsheet apps as well, controls built in for displaying database data.
Seriously, you're building word processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation apps on ... a word processing, spreadsheet capable database app. It probably does presentations too.
Guess what I can do! In 20 minutes I can make a complete IDE. I'll just start off with NetBeans RCP! https://netbeans.org/features/platform/
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
and your 'int main()' takes an unspecified amount of arguments. to specify 0 you'd do 'int main(void)'.
Nope. That's only true in a function declaration, but not in a function definition.
abuse your users
The GPL crowd really needs to get off the FUD bandwagon, the fear-mongering that goes with the 'you users are paying to be abused by evil corporations' is not convincing anybody. I'm not saying it's unfounded but the fact is you need to sell the premise on positives, you can't go around telling users how they are being abused and having their rights stolen or whatever other rhetoric by using an iPhone - for example - and expect them to care when the alternative is non-existent. It really is time to start doing rather than spreading FUD, the tipping point will come when the benefits speak for themselves and you can say 'hey this smartphone is better than an iPhone or Galaxy or whatever in the ways end users actually care about and it also happens to be free and open'.