The popularity of the OpenDocument Format (ODF), the ISO and OASIS standard for office application file formats, likely to be the most flexible and adaptable file format for the future, is growing all over the world. With the OpenOffice.org suite there already is a full featured and end user ready desktop application for working with ODF documents in a WYSIWIG style. OpenOffice.org is likely the most prominent desktop application supporting ODF. This is not really surprising as the former OpenOffice.org XML file format was the basis of ODF. But OpenOffice.org is not the only application supporting ODF. Many other applications support ODF, too, or plan to do so in the future. All this applications actually proving the openness of the file format.

But that is not all. The world is changing. Systems are changing and software is changing. And the requirements and use cases for ODF are changing and growing. WYSIWIG editors respectively office applications remain to be important, but there is a growing demand to have some kind of thin API to work on ODF directly without the need to deploy a full blown application suite.

Think about use cases. Ask yourself where it would make sense to programmatically manipulate ODF. Think about the application you use in your daily work and think especially about documents where it is important that the content will be still accessible for the next 20 or 50 years.

Two typical use cases coming to my mind:

• Automatic Document Creation
  Customer written business applications running either locally or on a server and creating documents without user interaction. For example, create thousands of documents in limited time fully automated.
• Document creation in client applications
  Using the format only and work on it with custom user interfaces. No typical WYSIWIG editor, more a form based application where the user can click through and a template based document is going to be created automatically. Later on the documents can be changed, printed, converted or whatever with any other ODF supporting tool.

More use cases can be found from the ODF Toolkit project homepage.

The main goal of the ODF Toolkit is to provide a set of API's to work on or with ODF documents directly. An API which can be used in any kind of application and where only a limited set of additional functional components is required to provide the necessary functionality. For some use cases an XSLT based API is maybe enough to provide the required functionality. For others obviously more complex functional components in the background are necessary. Think about document conversion into foreign formats to enable interoperability with other applications. Or think about printing documents which requires a layout engine somewhere.

We think it is important to have this kind of ODF related toolkit, and we also think that it makes sense to reuse existing implementations from OpenOffice.orgs code base wherever possible. OpenOffice.org is one reference desktop application for manipulating ODF. It makes perfectly sense to have a common cod base for common functionality. A common code base building the fundament not only for the ODF Toolkit or OpenOffice.org, but for all applications who want to manipulate ODF internally or want to support ODF in general. It will be a huge multiplier. Bug fixes, enhancements in the common code base automatically become available in all applications built on top of it, which is the reason why we want to align this ODF Toolkit with the OpenOffice.org project. OpenOffice.org has shown that it was able to free the way for ODF and we think that there is huge experience inside the project to create an ODF Toolkit. The project has shown its openness and probably nobody would argue against the role of OpenOffice.org in the open source world.

It is important to bundle resources and work together on the same goal!

A further multiplier can be the use of UNO as the underlying technology. It will allow to use the ODF Toolkit API from different programming languages. No limitation to an restricted set of applications using for example Java. But of course Java only API's for specific use cases and limited or better specialized functional areas are possible as well. The same is valid for any other programming language. But the long term vision currently is to have an UNO based ODF toolkit to support all the different and most often used languages with only one implementation.

Think about it! Or better join the new ODF Toolkit project. Don't forget to subscribe to the dev@odftoolkit.openoffice.org mailing list to participate in all the upcoming discussions. Bring in your ideas, your man power and help that this project becomes a success.

tags: odf openoffice.org toolkit