The Open Document Format (ODF) frees the user from vendor lock-in that comes with proprietary formats. The new ODF Toolkit Project will facilitate the creation of tools that allow users to break away from the legacy constraints office suites.
The ODF Toolkit Project, aims to enhance the ability of OpenOffice.org to be used as a programming framework as opposed to a desktop application. That is it will provide a means for developers to reuse OpenOffice.org code to enable their own applications to create and process Open Document (ODF) documents.
It gets better too, thanks to OpenOffice.orgs use of Universal Network Objects (UNO). UNO offers interoperability between programming languages, object models and hardware architectures, thus developers will not be limited to any particular language or hardware for their own projects.
So what will you be able to do with the ODF Toolkit? The ODF website outlines a number of target case studies, these include:
- Semi-Automatic and Automatic Document Creation
- Collaborative editing
- Format converters to/from ODF
- ODF Workflow Modelling
It’s early days, for this project, but there are solid foundations from the start. I currently use the OpenOffice.org suite to allow integration of proprietary formats in Apache Forrest. It works really well, but having to use the complete office suite is a bit cumbersome. This toolkit project should solve that issue.
So, if your current project needs to produce, manipulate or consume office documents head over to the ODF Toolkit Project and help make it a success.
0 Responses to “Open Document Format (ODF) Toolkit Project”