Over the last year, that refinement has taken place, sometimes with goals other than LOOL directly in mind. “It would have been possible to extend the GTK Javascript to allow tunnelling bespoke commands through to LibreOffice to allow the wrapping of custom UI,” Meeks writes in his blog, “but, still, the work to provide user interface that is expected on the web would be significant.” Even with funding, the technical approach needed to be refined before LOOL was practical. ![]() Such problems meant scaling of LOOL would quickly become a major challenge, both in terms of hardware requirements and general performance. And then of course you get these latency issues – you scroll down the page and the main server has to wake up send more pictures. Meeks notes that the prototype worked “surprisingly well,” but required one instance per app per user, and the constant presence of the server, “which is a disaster from any kind of memory consumption. Still another major part of the problem were the limitations of Meeks’ original prototype. So it’s fantastic when you finally find a customer like IceWarp that has the vision to see that this is really a key piece of the puzzle.” At Collabora, we’ve talked to a large number of people who want, but no customers who would pay for it. ![]() “Occasionally, someone gives us money, and TDF can invest in the basic infrastructure. 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.Īnother answer, Meek says, is that, unlike projects like Mozilla, The Document Foundation (TDF) has no large regular donors. In fact, at the first LibreOffice conference in Paris in 2011, Meeks demonstrated a prototype in which a virtual desktop runs in the browser. Both the technical approach and the reason for LOOL turn out to be very different from what many are assuming.Īs Meeks notes on his blog, the idea of LOOL is almost as old as LibreOffice itself. 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. Collabora and IceWarp recently announced the development of LibreOffice OnLine (LOOL).
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