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Owncloud 6 Brings Collaborative Open Document Format Editing to the Web
OwnCloud version six was released last week, and part of the release was a pretty major new feature: real-time collaborative editing of ODF documents (the format used by Libreoffice, Calligra, etc.). Although Etherpad has supported collaborating on simple text document for a while now, this is the first Free Software equivalent to Google Docs. From the article: "WebODF is a javascript library that lets you display ODF files in your browser. Think of it as PDF.js, but for ODF. You just throw a webodf.js script on your server, and do a couple of javascript calls to render an ODF file. It works completely client-side, no serverside ODF processing required. ... The collaborative server, included with OwnCloud Documents, lets users join a 'session', which is basically a document with a history of edit operations. Operations are small units of edits (think 'commits'). In a collaborative session, we use Operational Transformation techniques to make sure that operations fired by various clients will eventually result in a consistent state everywhere. When a new client joins an existing session, all earlier operations are played-back for it to reach the current state. Note that this editing is not turn-based; this is true inline collaborative editing where users can join a document and start editing straight away."
As always, source is available.
AbiWord and AbiCollab have been providing a free real-time document collaboration service in the cloud for 4 years.
See:
https://abicollab.net/
As a company that has government contracts forbidding us from storing data outside of canada, this library is very good news.
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The server-side is a fairly trivial install (especially because they provide repos for every major distro), mostly just depending on PHP. You can store data/config in MySQL, postgreSQL, or SQLite (the default, but obviously not recommended for multiple users). The files themselves have for some time been saved in per-user folders, with a separate folder for past versions of files (by default all files are versioned). For the Documents app, it seems to store a copy of each file named with a UUID/hash in the "documents" folder for each user, the filename that you see it as being merely kept in the database.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Owncloud has fixed lots of bugs, you should try it again! Works great for me!
AbiCollab certainly precedes by many years. WebODF is newer and has two advantages of AbiCollab.net.
First, WebODF runs just in a browser with no need to install it locally. It runs completely on a webpage. That's why it can by integrated into any web-based workflow. E.g. a user could generate a document by filling in a questionnaire and edit a document afterwards with WebODF.
Second, there is no document conversion. A document that is loaded into LibreOffice, AbiWord, OpenOffice, or Microsoft Office, edited and saved again, will be significantly different from the original document. Features may be lost or saved differently. Since WebODF just loads the ODF XML into the DOM and saves back the DOM, the document is unchanged, except for the places that have been edited. This is even true when the documents contains features, e.g. xforms, that are not supported yet.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
There is an other important different (at least for some people) it's freeware, not FOSS.
The LibreOffice dependence is just to generate the thumbnails. It is not needed to do editing or viewing of the ODF.
like who originated the odf format? hint, submitter and editor.. it was not libreoffice.
still need some help? figured you might. try sun microsystems (pre-oracle days) and openoffice.org (pre-dating the hissyfit that spawned the libreoffice fork). it was their specification that was used as the basis for odf standard.
Seems you're too young to have heard of StarDivision:
StarWriter 1.0 was written by Marco Borries in 1985 for the Zilog Z80. Borries formed StarDivision in Lüneburg the following year.
Sun acquired StarDivision in 1999.