Building LibreOffice Online
Team Building

© Images © Brian Jackson, 123RF.com
Collabora and Ice Warp team up to create LibreOffice Online for online and collaborative document creation and viewing.
Collabora and IceWarp recently announced [1] the development of LibreOffice OnLine (LOOL). The announcement was general, leading to all sorts of speculation, so to learn what was actually happening, I contacted Michael Meeks, the vice-president of productivity at Collabora and a board member of The Document Format, who is also one of the lead developers on the fledgling project. Both the technical approach and the reason for LOOL turn out to be very different from what many are assuming.
As Meeks notes on his blog, the idea of LOOL [2] is almost as old as LibreOffice itself. In fact, at the first LibreOffice conference in Paris in 2011, Meeks demonstrated a prototype in which a virtual desktop runs in the browser.
So why has LOOL taken four years to implement? One answer is that LibreOffice inherited code that had been improved slowly under Sun Microsystems, and everything needed to be done at once.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Linux Mint 22.2 Beta Available for Testing
Some interesting new additions and improvements are coming to Linux Mint. Check out the Linux Mint 22.2 Beta to give it a test run.
-
Debian 13.0 Officially Released
After two years of development, the latest iteration of Debian is now available with plenty of under-the-hood improvements.
-
Upcoming Changes for MXLinux
MXLinux 25 has plenty in store to please all types of users.
-
A New Linux AI Assistant in Town
Newelle, a Linux AI assistant, works with different LLMs and includes document parsing and profiles.
-
Linux Kernel 6.16 Released with Minor Fixes
The latest Linux kernel doesn't really include any big-ticket features, just a lot of lines of code.
-
EU Sovereign Tech Fund Gains Traction
OpenForum Europe recently released a report regarding a sovereign tech fund with backing from several significant entities.
-
FreeBSD Promises a Full Desktop Installer
FreeBSD has lacked an option to include a full desktop environment during installation.
-
Linux Hits an Important Milestone
If you pay attention to the news in the Linux-sphere, you've probably heard that the open source operating system recently crashed through a ceiling no one thought possible.
-
Plasma Bigscreen Returns
A developer discovered that the Plasma Bigscreen feature had been sitting untouched, so he decided to do something about it.
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.