Two ODF Toolkit releases in a row!

ODF is the Open Document Format, the native format used by LibreOffice (and supported by many other apps too). Then there’s the ODF Toolkit, a set of Java modules that allow programmatic creation, scanning and manipulation of ODF files. Svante Schubert writes with some updates:

We are happy to announce that there have been recently two ODF Toolkit releases in a row. These were our first releases at The Document Foundation (TDF), after the migration of the project to TDF in 2019:

• With the 0.9.0 release, we have our last JDK 8 release (due to a switch of the Java Doc Taglet API we are using). After this release, we dropped the so-called “Simple API” (which was once forked from our ODFDOM doc Java Package by IBM, but not merged back, leaving lots of duplicated code that was unable to embrace our new change API). And the XSLT Runner Ant plugin will be removed in a future release, as we are no longer using Ant but Maven (to avoid maintenance of untested functionality).

• With the 0.10.0 release, we support the next JDK 11 LTS version and our new change API that was implemented by myself for Open-XChange’s web office OX Documents – thanks to them, especially Malte Timmermann and Rafael Laguna for keeping the Apache License 2. Unfortunately, OX forked before I started there and it took me several months – and some sponsorship from a PrototypeFund project – to merge manually every file and enable all tests again (which some OX colleagues had disabled as they took too long…). (Please check out the PrototypeFund: Any German taxpayer may apply with an open-source project/idea!).

I would like to thank also all those numerous folks assisting us to make this work – especially recently in pushing this forward!

Especially, I would like to congratulate Michael Stahl for officially becoming the co-maintainer of this project. Michael has been my long term colleague (from StarOffice Hamburg times) and helps me constantly drop procrastination and/or fix issues I am no longer capable to realize as I looked too long at them. In addition, Michael and I also serve as editors of the OASIS ODF TC. There at the ODF TC, we envision having a faster turn-around of ODF spec deliveries and making their information set more readable for downstream software as we are. Thanks to allotropia software GmbH, Michael’s employer, for providing him with the time for working on these tasks!

So what’s next? Obviously, it’s more than time to release an ODF Toolkit 1.0.0.

Personally, I would like to get the code generation right, but keep as much compatibility to prior releases as possible. Michael and my aim is to work from the end of January on this release (any helping hand is most welcome) 😊

There is also ODF 1.3, to be embraced by a release in the near future.

In February, I will likely have an online talk at FOSDEM, at the LibreOffice dev room about our project and what I intend to do next year.

In a nutshell, I was able to receive some NGI Search funding for this project to enable search in ODF documents.

Aside from the obvious search API – focusing on one higher-level based on user semantic and likely having also one lower-level based on XML, I would like to refactor my “spaghetti feature code” in the SAX parser that made the implementation of the changes hard to maintain. Sorry for that, not my first and likely not my last mistake – but I am learning! 🙂

We’re going to work out a more elaborate picture for the FOSDEM presentation.

Until then, have fun with the ODF Toolkit!