In the past months we often heard complaints about the sluggish performance of some pages in the Environment Information System (EIS). If you are a regular user of the tool, then you should hopefully have noticed that the performance has improved in the past few weeks.

There were two steps we took. First and foremost Bernd Eilers optimized the caches of the database used by the application. This has a positive effect on all pages that retrieve larger amounts of data from the EIS database. Another optimization was to reduce the amount of data presented on the Child Workspace overview page, one of the most used pages of the application. This page now has tabbed folders which can be used to select the different sections, like attached issues or the tinderbox status, of the page instead of retrieving and displaying all data on one page:

These were relatively simple changes but they have a very positive effect on the performance of the tool. Should there be other areas which you think should be improved, then just let us know. The best place to raise such issues is the dev@tools.openoffice.org mailing list.

A new website http://tools.services.openoffice.org is there as a home for Web Applications offering services for OpenOffice.org which will hosts EIS and a new Dashboard Web Application. The start page also offers Links to the OpenOffice.org Wiki, the CodeSnippets and QATrack for convienience. The new Dashboard Web Application shows some statistical data provided by OpenOffice.org committees about OpenOffice.org website usage.

Lars Oppermann recently started the odf4j (odf for java) subproject of the OpenOffice.org ODF Toolkit project. I had some experimental stuff for ODF file handling in java lying around, merged that with what lars provided as initial java sources for odf4j added some new stuff and contributed the result to odf4j. And than EIS is now using this library to provide "View as OpenDocument (Calc)" links on every HTML page in EIS where one or more tables are being shown. That means that you can request every data you can get from EIS, especially the Statistics as an OpenDocument Spreadsheet document.

Doing something like this is very easy with the things now available in odf4j. If you´ve got some database query and want to create an OpenDocument SpreadsheetDocument from the result what you basically do is:

import org.openoffice.odf.spreadsheet.SpreadsheetDocument;
import javax.swing.table.TableModel;
import javax.swing.table.DefaultTableModel;
import java.sql.ResultSet;
import java.sql.Statement;
import java.io.OutputStream;
//...

public class MyClass {

public void createDocument(OutputStream out, String uri) {
SpreadsheetDocument doc=new SpreadsheetDocument();

// do database query
// ...

// create table model
TableModel model=new DefaultTableModel();

// fill model with result of database query
//...

// create Spreadsheet in the SpreadsheetDocument based on the data in the model
doc.addSpreadsheet("data",model);

// the SpreadsheetDocument constructor created a document with one empty Spreadsheet
// named "Sheet1" this Spreadsheet is not needed anymore, so we delete it
doc.deleteSpreadsheet("Sheet1");

// store the document
doc.save(out,uri);
}
// ...
}

The OpenOffice.org ODF Toolkit project and it´s odf4j subproject have just been started some time ago and are still seeking for people helping the effort.

You can checkout odf4j from OpenOffice.org CVS via:

cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.services.openoffice.org:/cvs co odftoolkit/odf4j

So far besides the stuff just mentioned for Spreadsheet Documents there´s not much specific functionality for document manipulation and information in there yet, but the basic stuff for working with the OpenDocument Package file format is there and we also have helper stuff for general XML manipulation (eg. XSL Transformation or working with org.w3c.dom trees) of ODF content etc. As demonstrated with the new EIS feature there are already use cases for where what we now have can be used in productive environment, altough it´s just all pretty alpha ;-). So well maybe you like what we´ve started and probably you would like to join the effort and might for example like to contribute some cool new methods for the SpreadsheetDocument class, it´s base class OpenDocument or for the other classes derived from the OpenDocument base class for other document types like Text Documents or Presentations.