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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.
That's because Facebook wasn't written in Java. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
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.
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.
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?