WebODF: an office suite built on browser technology

Jos van den Oever, KO Gmbh

Abstract

Office suites for the cloud are becoming more popular. All of them are closed source and -worse- running on a server that is outside of the control of the user. A Free Software solution for this problems is urgently needed.

WebODF is a library for adding OpenDocument Format (ODF) support to applications, regardless of whether they are running on the web or on the desktop. WebODF is a small Javascript library that can display ODF documents in browsers and HTML widgets. Currently, editing support is being added. WebODF can be used in web applications, desktop applications and mobile applications.

Bio

Jos van den Oever is in molecular sciences and bioinformatics, a long time proponent of open standards and a Linux and Free Software user. Since 2006 he has also become a contributor in the KDE community, where he is the founder and maintainer of Strigi, which is a library and program for indexing and searching files.

Since one and a half years, Jos is a dedicated FOSS developer working for KO GmbH. This company with the tagline "The Open Document Company" specializes in consulting about and programming for open standards for documents, mainly the Open Document Format. Initially, he worked on improving Calligra (then KOffice) for mobile devices, import document importing and helped on adding RDF support to it. At the moment Jos does ODF consulting for the Dutch government and work on WebODF. He is a member of the ODF Technical Committee.