Dear all, In one thing I have to agree with Dave. Some wake-up was required and I believe at least I heard it. Independent, how the Apache Foundation board will decide, if they allow the continuation of our project, one thing became clear to me: we need some replacement for Sun/Oracle and IBM our initial main contributors, who left us. It seems certain to me that this project needs companies to provide full-time developers and the financial capacities to make larger steps in moving forward.
Therefore, I have put more efforts in the advertisement of new business features of the ODFDOM module from the ODF Toolkit, especially in an office collaboration prototype: https://github.com/svanteschubert/odftoolkit/blob/odf-changes/README.md The reason for this feature and its high-level technical overview were explained earlier on this list <https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/ed1cec77f998bc9f6136b9da792d48b6778cfe4d38556aa6360448d8@%3Codf-dev.incubator.apache.org%3E> . In addition, I gave a presentation last week at the LibreOffice conference in Tirana (linked from above), which had the main purpose to me to distil the ideas of the past years and cover all the basics of collaboration by easy pictures in case a bus might hit me ;-) In the next weeks, I will continue working on the change feature. Its documentation, further refactoring and if I get some assistance on performance tests <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ODFTOOLKIT-479>, might be able to merge the project into our main trunk. With this feature, existing web based editors could become quite easily an ODF application, when exchanging user changes to the new ODFDOM module - see LibreOffice presentation for further details (PDF 1.4MB) <https://github.com/svanteschubert/odftoolkit/blob/odf-changes/LibOCon2018%20%20-%20Interoperable%20Office%20Collaboration.pdf> . In the upcoming winter, I am again sponsored by the PrototypeFund <https://prototypefund.de> and aim to work on the improvement of the source code generator of the ODF Toolkit. Today, was the first larger patch resulting from that funding: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ODFTOOLKIT-478 I have updated today our podling report, see https://wiki.apache.org/incubator/October2018 and I am curious how this works out. Be reassured, The Document Foundation (TDF) LibreOffice does see value in the Toolkit as you already may see by their provided online validator: https://odfvalidator.org/ We would receive the required infrastructure at the TDF if we require it. What worries me a bit is our Apache website. The site seems to be based on a proprietary CMS from Apache, which is interleaved with Subversion and using proprietary Pearl scripts to create a single HTML page from multiple MarkDown files and keeping references across pages up-to-date. If all went south, we likely need to continue to work on HTML, solely. Finally, to be honest I am unhappy with the existence of Simple API. It was once a fork from IBM, which was once also contributed to Apache along with the donations of Oracle. Unfortunately, a fork is far easier than a merge. Therefore my aim is to improve source code generation in ODFDOM and get an alternative to the Simple API, dropping redundancy and boilerplate. What do you think? Cheers, Svante PS: Tomorrow is a German public holiday and it is quite likely that I will not be able to respond to an email before Thursday, likely Friday. ᐧ
