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.
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