Hi Wolfgang, I have used the project to produce spreadsheet documents in a web based application. Here are my impressions on using the ODF toolkit (bear in mind that I have only used it to create spreadsheets, I have no experience with other formats).
The API roughly has two layers, the ODFDOM and the Simple API. As its name indicates, the first is a DOM model of the ODF XML "dialect", together with some useful methods for accessing this XML within existing ODF documents. The Simple API tries to add more useful methods on top of this ODF DOM for completing operations like writing to a spreadsheet and modifying its characteristics. The Simple API is useful for prototyping but I found it to be very limited for serious use cases. For instance, simple actions like writing to a cell are very slow when writing large spreadsheets. To be fair to the makers of this API, they seem to have tried to follow all the ins and outs of the ODF specification, which means that all sorts of strange corners cases have to be taken into account even when performing what seem like trivial operations like writing to a cell of the spreadsheet. Eventually I decided to forego the Simple API altogether and lean on the ODF DOM API instead. By implementing my own (simple) abstractions on top of this layer I could achieve much better performance and could ignore certain corner cases which I knew would not be relevant to me. This does mean you have to spend some time becoming familiar with the ODF specification and its expression in XML, but this approach definitely pays off. Furthermore, it makes you more aware of the subtleties involved in creating ODF spreadsheets that are compatible between different editors, such as Libre Office, Excel and Google Docs. If you are willing to use the ODF DOM API and learn a bit about the ODF specification then I would recommend the ODF toolkit (at least for spreadsheet operations). In the java world I am not sure there are too many other alternatives, at least I could not find any. Best, Nick 2015-04-06 7:14 GMT+02:00 Ian C <[email protected]>: > Hi Wolfgang, > > it is still maintained, but very quiet around here at the moment. > I think there are a number of users. > > > On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 12:44 AM, Medzi Matty <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hello, > > > > I cannot really comment on the state of the project and updates. > > > > On the other hand, I have used it in a major product to produce many and > > large documents (text documents). These are documents ready to be printed > > and published so the library is well equipped for these kinds of tasks. > > > > Just my opinion, but maybe others can chip in as well. > > > > Matyas > > > > > > Wolfgang Pausch wrote: > > > >> > >> Hello, > >> > >> I am currently thinking about possible ways to generate text or > >> spreadsheet documents in a project. > >> > >> Basically, odfdom is at least conceptionally quite close to my needs, > but > >> I notice that it recently (i.e. in the last years) had quite few > releases, > >> mailing list posts or commits. > >> > >> My question is thus: Is odfdom still a maintained project? Is is mature > >> enough that it can exist as useful library with only very occasional > >> changes? > >> Or should I rather consider it as a nearly-discontinued project where > >> introducing it newly into a project isn´t a good idea? > >> > >> What about the unsolved bugs in the jira? Are they important? > >> > >> Opinions about that? > >> > >> Thanks for any answers, > >> > >> Wolfgang > >> > > > > > -- > Cheers, > > Ian C >
