WebODF Making Good Progress, Aims For More

WebODF is an AGPL-licensed JavaScript library that provides Open Document Format support on the web with collaborative editing capabilities. In the four years the project has been around, it's been making great success but they have even more plans going forward.

WebODF is likely known to Phoronix users through its cooperation with ownCloud for collaborative document editing but this library can also be used externally by other web-sites with the ODF rendering done to HTML5 and CSS via JavaScript. At FOSDEM earlier this month was a presentation by WebODF's Jos van den Oever about the online text editor itself and its future. Those interested in all the details on the project itself can find the FOSDEM PDF slides and WebODF.org as the project site.

The new information shared during the presentation was their proposal for their future road-map. Possible upcoming items to WebODF include a general XML editor, floating UI elements with pluggable editing components, mobile international keyboard interaction, a presentation and spreadsheet editor, collaborative live editing with desktop software like LibreOffice, spelling and grammar checking support, the ability to lock parts of documents, images / table / header / footer editor support, a server-side library, and the ability to import OOXML files. This is a very interesting list of hopeful features and with some luck hopefully we will be able to report back on Phoronix in due time about the project's successes in reaching these milestones.