I'm cc'ing the POI and OpenOffice projects, inviting them to join this discussion on the Incubator general list: general@incubator.apache.org
When we were discussing the OpenOffice proposal a few weeks ago I mentioned that there was another set of technology called the ODF Toolkit, that we might want to bring to Apache as well. I heard some enthusiasm for this at the time, but I didn't have the bandwidth to put together another proposal. Now I do. I'd like to pitch the idea, and see if there is still interest in having a formal incubation proposal submitted, and if so, identifying a Champion and Sponsor for the proposal. Note that this would not be a fork. The ODF Toolkit Union Steering Committee met this morning and agreed to propose moving to Apache. As you probably know, ODF == Open Document Format, a open standard document format for office documents. The ODF standard is created at OASIS and then sent to ISO/IEC JTC1 for transposition into an International Standard. ODF 1.0 was first published in 2005. ODF 1.1 came out in 2007. And ODF 1.2 is "Candidate OASIS Standard" awaiting final approval in OASIS, probably by end of September. ODF 1.2 is what most applications are supporting today. OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Symphony, KOffice/Calligra Suite use ODF as native formats. Other applications, including Microsoft Office, Corel Wordperfect and Google Docs offer some degree of import/export support. ODF 1.2 is the version also supported by the ODF Toolkit. The ODF Toolkit Union maintains the following toolkits, all of them under the Apache 2.0 license: 1) ODFDOM is Java-based typed DOM API, relatively low level, a 1-to-1 mapping to the ODF schema. In fact, much of the code is generated by processing the schema. http://odftoolkit.org/projects/odfdom/pages/Home 2) Simple Java API for ODF is a high level wrapper of ODFDOM. So operations that might require several DOM-level operations, like deleting a column in a spreadsheet, are a single operation in the Simple API. Search and replace, copying slides from one presentation to another, adding hyperlinks to a selection, etc., are top level operations. http://simple.odftoolkit.org/ 3) The Conformance Tools projects is also in Java, and includes an online conformance checker of ODF documents, which can also be run in command line mode. http://odftoolkit.org/projects/conformancetools/pages/Home 4) XSLTRunner and XSLT Runner Task allows easy use of XSLT transforms with ODF documents. http://odftoolkit.org/projects/conformancetools/pages/ODFXSLTRunner 5) AODL is a C#/.NET library for ODF http://odftoolkit.org/projects/aodl/pages/Home I think there is natural synergy with Apache, especially with the Java components. For example, I could see publishing pipelines involving the ODF Toolkit with PDFBox, Batik, FOP, and POI. Having these tools under a common license, in one place, has obvious benefits. Moving this project over would not be a large technical effort. Mercurial ==> SVN, some simple website/wiki migration, 30 or so pages, a few mailing lists and bugzilla databases. It is currently on the Kenai infrastructure, so similar to OpenOffice, just much, much smaller in scale. I'm open as to whether this would be best eventually as a TLP or as part of an existing project, like POI or even OpenOffice. I'm leaning a little toward having this as a TLP, but I'm open to other ideas. Also, since this is already an open source project with all code under Apache 2.0, I assume no SGA is required? So please let me know if you agree that Apache would be a good location to further develop the ODF Toolkit libraries. Regards, -Rob --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
