ODF@WWW (An ODF Wiki)

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Thursday, 19 Jun 2008

ODF@WWW (An ODF Wiki)

Kay Ramme

GullFOSS postings related to ODF@WWW:
19 Jun 2008 - ODF@WWW (An ODF Wiki)
27 Jun 2008 - ODF@WWW -How it works
04 Jul 2008 - ODF@WWW - Simply Install
22 Jul 2008 - ODF@WWW - Going forward ...

Using OOo in my daily work as well as the OOo Wiki, I noticed an obvious disconnect between these two, especially taking into consideration, that we like to promote ODF with OOo.

OOo is used to create and to modify rich documents, which are mostly stored as data files on the local hard disk. Typical scenarios include attaching these documents/files to mails or uploading them somewhere. OOos strength is it's WYSIWYG approach for changing rich documents, which includes spreadsheets, drawings, presentations and certainly texts. Though nowadays this does not seem to be sufficient anymore, "sharing" as by publication to a few or many individuals needs to be addressed as well. Not supporting this is OOos weakness ...

Wikis, as opposed to rich documents, are more lightweight and allow the direct editing of pages of a particular website by clicking an unspectacular "edit" link. Unfortunately one has to learn a dedicated "programming language", which is not suitable for creating expressive tables or graphics but mostly for simple text only. The document handling is a Wikis strength, but the document editing and simpleness are it's weaknesses ...

Thinking about that, I understood that these two approaches may be married to become an "ODF Wiki", combing their strength - simple editing and simple publishing - while eliminating their weaknesses.

No sooner said than done, I installed an apache webserver, enabled WebDAV, did some (hacky) bash scripting, and got the following:

(YouTubes resolution is not the best, you can download the video as 1280x720 from mediacast. It is showing OpenOffice.org used as a WYSIWYG editor for documents stored on a webserver. Demoing Wiki like capabilities of adding, retrieving, manipulating and publishing documents.)

One may notice, that the "full" experience with an "ODF Wiki" may be achieved by donating a browse-mode to OOo. Nothingness the "ODF Wiki" does certainly support HTML access as well. The demoed scenario is only one of many use cases natively supporting ODF on the server and using OOo as a client. The Wiki approach may be applied to blogging as well, though this is only the tip of the iceberg. Just imagine what you could do, if you make the parts (such as paragraphs, styles etc.) or the content of the stored documents accessible, e.g. from the "gallery" (the thing I copied the image from), you could easily recombine it (either by inserting copies or references) to create other documents.

If you like, or even if you don't like, what you see, please comment. I believe this approach has huge potential and would love to hear your thoughts, impressions etc. and would certainly like to see YOU helping with bringing this forward :-)

Setting up the "ODF Wiki" with the scripts etc. is very simple. I am going to give the details in one of my next blogs :-)

To be continued ...

Regards

Kay

tags: apache odf opendocument openoffice.org wiki

Posted by Kay Ramme on 19 Jun 2008 | PermaLink |

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Digg this | Comments[19]

Comments:

Wow this is really amazing, finally someone came up with some of my pipe dreams :)

True ODF goal goes beyond an office document and into a powerful XML schema with data to traspass between apps (browser / editors)

Now frameworks suddenly became relevant to develop for ODF.

Now we only need that libodf so we can have ODF content on the standard output.

Posted by JZA on June 20, 2008 at 07:41 AM CEST #

It's an excellent idea, and it is, as you pointed out the tip of the iceberg: what you demoed is the future of OOo. A modular application that can be made lightweight or complete, running both online and off line.

Great job!

Posted by chs on June 20, 2008 at 03:08 PM CEST #

What are the chances of having an ODF CMS?

Most frameworks make it so easy to generate CMS nowadays. Django, Turbogears Cake or Rails.

Having an ODF CMS willl allow us to build a data rich enviroments powerful on the client side yet easy to access on the server side.

Now when you said 'hacky bash scripting' you mean that this is running as cgi?

Posted by Alexandro Colorado on June 20, 2008 at 07:06 PM CEST #

Kay,
This is great! For wikis to really get used by normal users for company intranets, they need this kind of easy-to-use interface, just as you've developed here!

I had written some ideas similar to this in my blog, and maybe they'll make sense to you, or perhaps you've already included them.

http://www.solidoffice.com/openoffice/wiki-extension

What do you think is the next step in building this out?

-Ben

Posted by Benjamin on June 20, 2008 at 07:45 PM CEST #

Hi Kay,

does this work for non-localhost as well?

Regards, Uli.

Posted by Uli Heller on June 21, 2008 at 10:01 AM CEST #

Outstanding functionality, congrats!
I think this is the future: Mature native desktop apps as a client for (group based) web publishing.

Jochen

Posted by Jochen Plumeyer on June 21, 2008 at 09:52 PM CEST #

We have been working on a system that takes this approach for a few years now. It is a good idea to allow editing in a word processor, but the devil is in the details.

See this post:

http://ptsefton.com/2008/06/20/an-ice-like-odf-based-web-publishing-system.htm

Posted by Peter Sefton on June 23, 2008 at 01:56 AM CEST #

Hi Ben,

what you describe is quite similar to what I have in mind, though I am not sure regarding Base as the repository. ODF is the reference file format, HTML is created just on the fly. Quite important is the dualism, provide documents as HTML for browsers (read-only), and as ODF for Office suites :-)

Regards

Kay

Posted by Kay Ramme on June 23, 2008 at 09:49 AM CEST #

Hi Uli,

this is going to work for non "localhost" as well, it is just that I have "localhost" hard coded in the scripts currently, please stay tuned for the next blog entry, you may actually be able to help me getting this right :-)

Regards

Kay

Posted by Kay Ramme on June 23, 2008 at 09:51 AM CEST #

Hi Peter,

I saw you posting already, though I have to admit, that I don't yet understand where the problems are ... my focus was basically to keep things simple, for the above demo I wrote about ~120 lines Bash, a makefile and a http.conf. Please stay tuned, I give the details in the next blog entry.

Regards

Kay

Posted by Kay Ramme on June 23, 2008 at 09:55 AM CEST #

This is quite clever indeed. However, to make it really cool it would need an additional in-browser editor that lets you work on the document without having OOo installed. It wouldn't need to support the full syntax, but it should be possible to work an any document without destroying any mayrkup that this browser editor doesn't know.

Posted by Daniel on June 27, 2008 at 08:38 PM CEST #

What happens if two people want to edit the document at the same time ?

Posted by Opoho on June 28, 2008 at 05:40 PM CEST #

Awesome! (Hey, and the soundtrack was great too). Directions to go:

1) as per Opoho, some kind of locking or other multi-access control.

2) Integration with version control (although the wiki's editing history might be enough for many use cases).

3) Access control mechanisms so that documents can be shared safely in internet or intranet environment.

4) Encryption/Decryption on client side ... what is posted is encrypted as far as world sees.

Posted by humble11 on June 29, 2008 at 07:19 PM CEST #

OHMYGOD!

M$ is gonna be so over it!

They're gonna try to do whatever they can to steal this idea or kill it if they can not make it live!

This is the future of documents and ODF and OOo got it right!

Posted by omigod on June 30, 2008 at 12:23 AM CEST #

Hmmm... I've read this and looked at ICE as suggested but I don't see a topic based solution here.

What I would like to see is a way of authoring topics (with version control access control etc) that can then be combined into a greater deliverable. A wiki is fine. A PDF is fine but what about online help? Javahelp, Eclipse help, and even (dare I say it) HTML help. Writing is getting more modular so that it can be reused across teams and across documents. What I see here is a all concerned with linear stand-alone documents.

I have in mind a scheme where topics (short documents) are created collaboratively, just like they are in ICE, then combined using a Calc spreadsheet into collections. The collections can then be opened as a Master document for printing or compilation into one of the help outputs - possibly by exporting to docbook and using the existing conversion scripts. True open-source, collaboration and single-sourcing.

> ICE doesn’t use WebDAV because, well, it doesn’t work with
> Windows reliably and it doesn’t work with the Mac too well either.

WebDAV has an associated standard called DeltaV for versioning and collaboration.

Richard

Posted by Richard on June 30, 2008 at 06:31 PM CEST #

Hi guys,

some comments and answers ...

The "Edit..." button could certainly link to a web based editor etc. as well, though I think, the real benefit is in connecting it with a native application. It could also install an OOo if none is available, though OOos download size might be a little to huge to make it real interactive experience ... ;-)

Actually I have to admit, that I don't yet know what happens if two people try to edit the same document concurrently, I expect WebDAV respectively OOo to somehow solve that, as this is not a new (but may be now more common) situation anyway. My expectation is, that either the document becomes locked or that the last write wins ... I am going to give installation instructions end of the week, so you may want to try it out yourself :-)

I think an ODF Wiki is only the tip of the iceberg, it becomes far more interesting thinking about collaborating on parts of documents etc-, which are to be combined to compound documents. I am already looking forward to what we are coming up with ... :-)

Regards

Kay

Posted by Kay Ramme on July 02, 2008 at 12:19 PM CEST #

Hi Kay

We really appreciate what you're doing. I think there are many ways in witch we can collaborate with this project, so please let us know how.

Regards

Juan

Posted by Juan Lavieri on July 03, 2008 at 04:35 AM CEST #

Hi Juan,

there are many thinks we can do, to bring this further:
- Actively promote this (the ODF@WWW Wiki :-), tell it everybody, even if they don't want to hear it :-)
- Try it out, I gave some brief installation instructions in my last posting - http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/odf_www_simply_install
- Think how we want to proceed on this, what is good, what is bad, where do we want to go.

I think we need a more pervasive communications channel ...

Regards

Kay

Posted by Kay Ramme on July 07, 2008 at 10:37 AM CEST #

Hi Kay.

Really there are many things to do.

Thank you very much for the installation instructions and sample files, I'm reading them to have my own ODF wiki asap.

Regards

Juan

Posted by Juan Lavieri on July 10, 2008 at 10:14 PM CEST #