Collabora Office OPENSUSE-LIBREOFFICE CONF’20 Required Magic advanced technology History of Online and Mobile @JHolesovsky, By Jan Holešovský Collabora Productivity
Col .. 3 collabora online . org 2011-2012: “Android: Get something on the screen” Pioneered by Tor Lillqvist and Michael Meeks, LibreOffice was cross-compiled to Android ● Research work at SUSE ● Sheer amount of limitations on the way ● Linker – a limited about of dynamic libraries in one app ● Fontconfig, using the assets, … ● Mergelib, components constructors – Matúš Kukan ● First loader – Iain Billett ● Debugging a nightmare! ● But resulted in the first version showing LibreOffice on the screen
Col .. 4 collabora online . org The 1st iteration just showed the entire LibreOffice UI Not usable for real work, but showed it was possible! ● See the menus and toolbars
Col .. 5 collabora online . org 2012-2013: Rendering whole pages Just a viewer ● But closer to what the mobile UI is supposed to look like ● Scrolling the entire document: problem
Col .. 7 collabora online . org 2013: Tiled rendering ● Collabora Productivity was spun off by SUSE, and got a client CloudOn – who needed a mobile app on iOS ● So far their business was streaming MSO instance to the user, but wanted a native app ● At that time, tiled rendering was used by many, iOS even had a convenient widget for this ● LibreOfficeKit was started ● Thin C/C++ API to access internals of the LibreOffice core ● Focused on the tiled rendering ● Callbacks for the events that come from the core – triggered by timers or users actions
Col .. 8 collabora online . org 2014-2015: LibreOfficeKit used for rendering Tomaž Vajngerl introduced tiled rendering into the Android app ● Thanks to Smoose who helped co-funding this ● Using the compositing code from Mozilla ● The document consists of “tiles”, each can be rendered separately ● Editing made possible thanks to Miklos Vajna ● TDF tender helped ● It’s easy to re-draw a tile after invalidation!
Col .. 10 collabora online . org 2015: The first Online code ● Finally Collabora has found (co-)funding for developing Online – thanks to IceWarp ● Initially a viewer ● Extended to editing app (one editor) ● Then shared editing – one editor who could edit, the others viewers ● Was possible to switch who was editing, but still only one person ● After several years – collaborative editing ● Reusing the “multiple views” feature in LibreOffice (that I think nobody have been using until then ;-) - and suddenly it is the core of everything) ● Server part in C++, client part re-using LeafletJS
Col .. 11 collabora online . org 2016-2018: More in the Android app, but not enough Christian Lohmaier, Ximeng Zu, Mert Tumer and many more are adding various features ● But the Android app is not catching up ● Lots of LibreOfficeKit improvements triggered by the Online development
Col .. 12 collabora online . org 2017: Online got dialogs routing in the meantime ● Until now, we were re-writing various dialogs we needed for the functionality in JavaScript ● Turned out to be unbearable long-term ● Solution: Route the existing dialogs as pixels ● Dialogs not using the tiled rendering, invalidating only the relevant parts etc. ● Many corner case fixed ● Like different users can have dialogs in different languages, or both open the same dialog type ● Dialogs had to be made asynchronous
Col .. 13 collabora online . org 2018: Sharing more of Online and Mobile ● Turns out that having three (web, iOS, Android) distinct implementations of the editing functionality on top of LibreOfficeKit is extremely hard to maintain ● Android version lagging behind terribly, iOS not in a great shape either ● But Online flourishing ● Idea: Share the code, have even the Mobile apps inside a webview ● Jan Iversen started prototyping, Tor Lillqvist took it to the next level ● The iOS app switched to this approach ● Surprisingly the performance of this solution is reasonably good!
Col .. 14 collabora online . org 2019: Use the Online as the base for the Android app Idea the same as what Tor Lillqvist has done for the iOS ● Make the app UI just a WebView ● Reuse loolwsd for the document rendering ● Use the existing JavaScript to compose the tiles, handle the UI, everything… ● Share code! At the same time a lot of iOS improvements ● Thanks to Adfinis co-funding!
Col .. 15 collabora online . org 2019: Start of rendering core dialogs via JS ● Developed by Szymon Klos ● First for the mobile apps and online ● To re-use the sidebar for navigation using one finger ● Actions called via .uno commands This is the sidebar!
Col .. 16 collabora online . org 2020: Further improvements everywhere ● Chromebook support – Android app extended to handle that ● JS dialogs on the next level – now the Notebookbar is using the same thing ● .uno: commands were not enough ● Reusing the uitest API! ● Great – because improvements in the handling of JS dialogs improve the testing possibilities in LibreOffice and vice versa
Col .. 17 collabora online . org The future ● More JS dialogs usage everywhere ● Even the sidebar in the desktop case? ● Reduce usage of LeafletJS (loleaflet) ● Use canvas for the rendering ● All the Writer / Calc / Impress do now, but need bugfixing ● Reduce usage of POCO ● Paper cut fixing ● Lots of good feedback from the Google Play reviews
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