Anyway, various workarounds were found, and this was progressing nicely, but then CloudOn was acquired and lost interest.
#COLLABORA ONLINE JAVASCRIPT CODE#
One major challenge here turned out to be the massive size of the LibreOffice core code, which was problematic as Apple at that time restricted the size of the executable code in an iOS app quite severely. We started working on making the LibreOffice core useful for that, based on my earlier work, and using tiled rendering for this, too. The user interface in Online, in JavaScript, requests and displays these tiles and provides the user interface that send user input and edit request as necessary to the core.Īlso in the same timeframe, the CloudOn company needed an iOS app with the ability to load and edit office documents natively on an iOS device. In this approach a client requests the core to render a document as “tiles”, rectangular pixmaps. Some year later, for Collabora Online, the concept of “tiled rendering” was introduced by Michael Meeks. But just making the functionality needed to even load and save documents on iOS, for instance, was challenging enough, given the somewhat obscure and complex internal plumbing of LibreOffice with its long history. There was initially no clear product plan and no technical exact plans how, once the core code works on iOS, it can and would be used in an actual app. Initially this was mostly done in spare time, for fun. Work on enabling compiling the LibreOffice core for iOS (cross-compiling, on a Mac, as all iOS development is done) was started originally back in 2011, by me. In the app all this code runs on the device, there is no server involved. Plus, finally, a rather small amount of glue code in Objective-C++. Collabora Office for iOS is based on the C++ server-side code for Collabora Online (based on LibreOffice Online), and JavaScript code for the same (browser-side).
This talk will describe the history and technical aspects of the effort. After several years of only occasional progress but mostly stagnation, resources have now been available for work on a LibreOffice-based app for iOS.
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