Java developer says he built basic office suite in 30 days





  • Cross-platform not-web-based office solution, OK. Not so bad of an idea, as for me. The fun question is, is it compatible with existing document formats?



  • Who hasn't done something like that? Heck, I can build a "basic" text editor in NetBeans in 5 minutes. There must be a gazillion of them. The problem is making it less than basic. And interoperability, indeed. And scaleable. And giving it a decent user-experience. Why does anyone report on this?



  • @Unisol said:

    Cross-platform not-web-based office solution, OK. Not so bad of an idea, as for me. The fun question is, is it compatible with existing document formats?
     

    According to its website "It works with Microsoft document formats (docx, xslx, pptx)".

    I assume this means it can open them, but all images will be randomly distributed through the docoment and every paragraph will be randomly formatted.



  • @spamcourt said:

    @Unisol said:

    Cross-platform not-web-based office solution, OK. Not so bad of an idea, as for me. The fun question is, is it compatible with existing document formats?
     

    According to its website "It works with Microsoft document formats (docx, xslx, pptx)".

    I assume this means it can open them, but all images will be randomly distributed through the docoment and every paragraph will be randomly formatted.

    So... same as usual for most people.

     


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

     I took him 30 days to fork OpenOffice?



  •  TRWTF is the Linux version, which comes as a combined shell-script/JAR file.  Probably the first legitimate use of the GIFAR hack that I've seen.

     



  • @spamcourt said:

    @Unisol said:

    Cross-platform not-web-based office solution, OK. Not so bad of an idea, as for me. The fun question is, is it compatible with existing document formats?
     

    According to its website "It works with Microsoft document formats (docx, xslx, pptx)".

    I assume this means it can open them, but all images will be randomly distributed through the docoment and every paragraph will be randomly formatted.

    It is fairly easy to read and write Office 2007+ documents, they are basically a well-documented ZIP archives full of xml files and images. The bitch is trying to also support pre-Office 2007 formats, which are nothing more than binary serialized objects built on a very weird and arcane model (Word structure is way more bizarre than Excel).




  • OpenOffice.org has had a decade and still hasn't managed to build a basic office suite in Java..



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    StarOffice OpenOffice LibreOffice has had a decade and still hasn't managed to build a basic office suite in Java..

    FTFY and I'm pretty sure there is already a new fork in the making. Possibly FreeOffice or something like that.



  • @Ronald said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    StarOffice OpenOffice LibreOffice has had a decade and still hasn't managed to build a basic office suite in Java..

    FTFY and I'm pretty sure there is already a new fork in the making. Possibly FreeOffice or something like that.

    EleutheriaOffice.



  • @Ronald said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    StarOffice OpenOffice LibreOffice has had a decade and still hasn't managed to build a basic office suite in Java..

    FTFY and I'm pretty sure there is already a new fork in the making. Possibly FreeOffice or something like that.

    When will they understand that anything called LibreOffice will never, ever gain a lot of popularity? Seriously, what is it with open source projects and stupid naming?



  • @TGV said:

    And giving it a decent user-experience

    He used Java. He needs to trash it and start over.



  • @DaveK said:

     TRWTF is the Linux version, which comes as a combined shell-script/JAR file.  Probably the first legitimate use of the GIFAR hack that I've seen.

     


    SHAR archives are almost as old as Unix was, you know.



  • You know, for all the flaws this software may have, this dude sure knows how to drum up some media attention. So far today, I have seen this fucking thing on here, Hacker News, and Reddit. For such a hideous app, created by an unknown developer and marketed in a way that demonstrates absolutely no understanding of even the basic purpose of a demo, the amount of exposure it's managed to get is amazing.

    @joeffice.org said:

    The top 10 reasons to choose Joeffice

    • It's written in Java - the most popular computer language


     



  • @GNU Pepper said:

    @joeffice.org said:
    The top 10 reasons to choose Joeffice
    • It'll give you AIDS - the most popular debilitating disease

    FTFY



  • Guys, you're seriously getting repetitive and booooring.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @GNU Pepper said:

    You know, for all the flaws this software may have, this dude sure knows how to drum up some media attention. So far today, I have seen this fucking thing on here, Hacker News, and Reddit. For such a hideous app, created by an unknown developer and marketed in a way that demonstrates absolutely no understanding of even the basic purpose of a demo, the amount of exposure it's managed to get is amazing.
     

    Oh, hi. I didn't see you there. As you can see, I'm in my gown and cap, and I have this small snifter of brandy. A nightcap to go with my nightcap, if you will. Ha ha ha. Oh, the fun we have here. And I'd like to have just one more chuckle before I head off to, as the Great Bard said, sleep, perchance to dream. So here we go, good fellow:

    "You know, for all the flows this software may have, this dude sure hows how to troll. So far today, I have seen fuckers getting trolled by it here, Hacker News, and Reddit. Given that he only spent 30 days on it, the amount of effort vs. reaction (aka: Troll Ratio) it's managed to get is amazing."

     I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I certainly know my belly will be laughing me to sleep tonight. What marvelous times we have.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @veggen said:

    Guys, you're *seriously* getting repetitive and booooring.
     

    Speaking of repetitive, you might want to check your keyboard's refresh rate. You've got a few too many Os there.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @GNU Pepper said:

    You know, for all the flaws this software may have, this dude sure knows how to drum up some media attention. So far today, I have seen this fucking thing on here, Hacker News, and Reddit. For such a hideous app, created by an unknown developer and marketed in a way that demonstrates absolutely no understanding of even the basic purpose of a demo, the amount of exposure it's managed to get is amazing.
     

    Oh, hi. I didn't see you there. As you can see, I'm in my gown and cap, and I have this small snifter of brandy. A nightcap to go with my nightcap, if you will. Ha ha ha. Oh, the fun we have here. And I'd like to have just one more chuckle before I head off to, as the Great Bard said, sleep, perchance to dream. So here we go, good fellow:

    "You know, for all the flows this software may have, this dude sure hows how to troll. So far today, I have seen fuckers getting trolled by it here, Hacker News, and Reddit. Given that he only spent 30 days on it, the amount of effort vs. reaction (aka: Troll Ratio) it's managed to get is amazing."

     I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I certainly know my belly will be laughing me to sleep tonight. What marvelous times we have.

    If you watch the video with the sound turned off at the default resolution, it looks like Office 95 if you squint really hard.

    So I guess that kinda works for an office suite.



  • @GNU Pepper said:

    You know, for all the flaws this software may have, this dude sure knows how to drum up some media attention. So far today, I have seen this fucking thing on here, Hacker News, and Reddit. For such a hideous app, created by an unknown developer and marketed in a way that demonstrates absolutely no understanding of even the basic purpose of a demo, the amount of exposure it's managed to get is amazing.

    This is insane! Already 2,184 views on the youtube video!



    It's over 2% of the views of this video where a girl shows a cute outfit for under $100. Astounding success, the VC must be lining up. I'm sure Yahoo will buy that thing for another billion.



  • @Ronald said:

    It's over 2% of the views of this video where a girl shows a cute outfit for under $100.
     

    That outfit IS pretty cute. I mean, not excepcionally cute, but still cute enough to make a video of it, I think. You can certainly find cuter outfits if you try. So overall I'd say its not a bad 2-minute video, considering it was free. I assign that video 7 points out of 10 on the girls showing a cute outfit for under $100 in 2 minutes on a free Youtube video scale.



  • @GNU Pepper said:

    I have seen this fucking thing on here, Hacker News, and Reddit.

    TRWTF.



  • @Ronald said:

    the VC must be lining up.

    The VC don't line up, they stay hidden in trees and tunnels. That's what makes killing them so hard.



  • @spamcourt said:

    That outfit IS pretty cute.

    The shoes and shorts are okay, I guess. The top are tit curtains.. just a bunch of fabric hanging below her tits. You can't even tell how fat she is.



  • @Ronald said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    StarOffice OpenOffice LibreOffice has had a decade and still hasn't managed to build a basic office suite in Java..

    FTFY and I'm pretty sure there is already a new fork in the making. Possibly FreeOffice or something like that.

    OpenOffice is still around (and not even with the .org anymore) but it's not a Sun/Oracle thing. It's gone to the Java graveyard that is the Apache Foundation, to rot alongside Google Wave.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @spamcourt said:

    I assume this means it can open them, but all images will be randomly distributed through the docoment and every paragraph will be randomly formatted.
    There's a fairly decent Java library for that, which solves a lot of the really hard part when getting to first release. (Java's got a number of poor features — if fewer catastrophically bad ones beyond that damn browser plugin — but it is such a big ecosystem that there are some genuinely interesting libraries for it. Most nicer languages just don't have the sheer scope of libraries…)



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    remember wave?
     

    I do now. Geez. Thanks.



  • @Ronald said:

    It is fairly easy to read and write Office 2007+ documents, they are basically a well-documented ZIP archives full of xml files and images.
    Not the 2007 and 2010 ones - the well-documented ISO-approved OOXML files are only written by Office 2013 (at least that's what Microsoft promised a few years ago - I haven't had the opportunity to check if they actually did it). 2007 and 2010 basically took the old binary formats and dumped them to a bunch of zipped XMLs.



  • @ender said:

    @Ronald said:
    It is fairly easy to read and write Office 2007+ documents, they are basically a well-documented ZIP archives full of xml files and images.
    Not the 2007 and 2010 ones - the well-documented ISO-approved OOXML files are only written by Office 2013 (at least that's what Microsoft promised a few years ago - I haven't had the opportunity to check if they actually did it). 2007 and 2010 basically took the old binary formats and dumped them to a bunch of zipped XMLs.

    Yes, Office 2013 almost always shows "this document is in compatibility mode" when opening docx and pptx, which is honestly confusing as hell ("I thought this was the new format"?).

    Have you seen the standard? The main PDF is 5026 pages long (and there's still a few more documents). In contrast the OpenDocument format has 722 pages (<15% of the size), and does pretty much the same things. It has taken ages for HTML renderers to start being cross-compatible, and that's a well-known, easy to understand format. To think anyone will ever correctly implement that enormous thing is just crazy.


    For all practical purposes I'd say there are 2 document formats today: files generated by MS Office and files generated by Open/LibreOffice. Whether they end in .docx or .odt is irrelevant, you won't be able to view it correctly in the other office suite.



  • @wrack said:

    @DaveK said:

     TRWTF is the Linux version, which comes as a combined shell-script/JAR file.  Probably the first legitimate use of the GIFAR hack that I've seen.

    SHAR archives are almost as old as Unix was, you know.

    Not the same thing at all.  sharchives embed binary files in an 7-bit clean text format and extract them when run.  The file I describe above does not extract anything; it actually is both a JAR file and a shell script at the same time.



  • @DaveK said:

     TRWTF is the Linux version, which comes as a combined shell-script/JAR file.  Probably the first legitimate use of the GIFAR hack that I've seen.

     

    TRTRWTF is that the shell script is several thousand lines long.



  • @DaveK said:

    @wrack said:

    @DaveK said:

     TRWTF is the Linux version, which comes as a combined shell-script/JAR file.  Probably the first legitimate use of the GIFAR hack that I've seen.

    SHAR archives are almost as old as Unix was, you know.

    Not the same thing at all.  sharchives embed binary files in an 7-bit clean text format and extract them when run.  The file I describe above does not extract anything; it actually is both a JAR file and a shell script at the same time.

    However, to correct myself: it does in fact extract things from itself as a JAR, and apparently it's a standard mechanism for bundling/delivering netbeans applications on *nix platforms, so must have been around for some time.

     



  • @spamcourt said:

    Have you seen the standard? The main PDF is 5026 pages long (and there's still a few more documents).

    The file format spec is the program spec. I don't know why people continually fail to understand this.

    Look, if Word adds a feature Blah, it needs to have some way of annotating Blah in the file format. So (virtually) each feature added to Word appears as a couple paragraphs in the file format specification. That's fine and good, that's how programs work. Look at the file spec and you have a pretty fucking good idea what the features of the program are.

    The problem comes when people go, "we want to standardize a document format that all word processors should use, and no word processors can use things not in the standard format!" Then you've effectively stopped software innovation in its tracks by listing a standard set of features all word processors *must* have (otherwise they can't be compatible with the file format), and if that wasn't bad enough, you've also prohibited the word processor from implementing any features *not* in the file format spec.

    So you want to write a new word processor because you have some idea for a brand new feature? Well: tough shit. You can't publish until it supports the standard file format (meaning, you've implemented 340,000 features that you have no interest in), and you can't save in the file format when you're done with your shiny new feature, because nothing else that reads the format would have a way of understanding it. Unless you publish your shiny new feature to the format spec, now every other word processor on Earth not only *can* steal your competitive advantage, but they *must* steal your competitive advantage to remain compatible with the file format.

    Microsoft's spec is big because Word has a lot of features. OpenOffice's is small because OpenOffice has relatively few features.

    The OOXML people, by claiming all word processors should share the same file format but can compete on features, are way out in la-la-land. What competitive feature doesn't involve altering the file format? Maybe a better spell checker? Maybe? It's a fucking ridiculous concept, and the fact that the EU government throws their sissy euro-weight behind it only proves the point further-- "well it makes no sense, but it might make headaches for an American corporation, and since the entire purpose of the EU at this point seems to be making headaches for American corporations, let's pass it! That's much easier than actually fucking competing in the economy."

    #LeftoverRantsFromTheOOXMLDebate



  • @DaveK said:

    @wrack said:

    @DaveK said:

     TRWTF is the Linux version, which comes as a combined shell-script/JAR file.  Probably the first legitimate use of the GIFAR hack that I've seen.


    SHAR archives are almost as old as Unix was, you know.

    Not the same thing at all.  sharchives embed binary files in an 7-bit clean text format and extract them when run.  The file I describe above does not extract anything; it actually is both a JAR file and a shell script at the same time.




    I don't remember right now what it was, but the way I've found out shar archives exist was because of an installer that was a single large file that was a small shell script and a binary TAR file concatenated together.

    The script displayed the EULA, asked a few questions, then unpacked the tar by piping itself to a function that was reading bytes, discarded a known number (or maybe waited for a marker - was long ago), and piped rest to /bin/tar.

    It had a comment in lines of "this is a shar archive", and that made me google up the term.



    You know, now thinking about it, it might have been some ancient version of Sun JDK (I think that was 1.4 or 1.5 era).



  • I've seen nVidia's drivers distributed this way: "download this file then run `bash whateverthefilewas`".



  • @blakeyrat said:

    The OOXML people, by claiming all word processors should share the same file format but can compete on features, are way out in la-la-land.
    OOXML is Microsoft's format.



  • @ender said:

    OOXML is Microsoft's format.

    Oh I made a minor mistake, better shut down ALL BRAINPOWER and ignore the other 99% of the post.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @blakeyrat said:

    @ender said:
    OOXML is Microsoft's format.

    Oh I made a minor mistake, better shut down ALL BRAINPOWER and ignore the other 99% of the post.

     

    You should have used an exclaimation point at the end of your sentence.

    Also, that post was only 95 characters long, so I'm focusing on your mistake and ignoring the other 98.95% of it (after rounding).

     



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @ender said:
    OOXML is Microsoft's format.

    Oh I made a minor mistake, better shut down ALL BRAINPOWER and ignore the other 99% of the post.

    The mistake was located near the end of the post so worst case scenario I would have ignored only what came after, which was about 18%. However since OOXML sounded like something non-Microsoft it did not prevent me from nodding in agreement.



    Standard-obsessed people are a nuisance. It's like those fuckers who complain that Cisco does not follow standards while a shitload of those standards are derived from proprietary technologies pioneered (and funded) by Cisco.



    LibreOffice is a very nice project, but there is no individual or company out there that can say they did more than Microsoft to make word processors and spreadsheets a commodity. Which is totally different from being the first ot the more open. Kudos to VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Wordperfect, Amipro and all the others, but it's Microsoft that pushed hard to build the market, just like Apple did for mp3 players or VMware for virtualization. Render unto Caesar and all that.



  • @wrack said:

    You know, now thinking about it, it might have been some ancient version of Sun JDK (I think that was 1.4 or 1.5 era).

    The Sun JDK was shipped as a SHAR for quite some time. Only in the last year or two did they move to bundling it as a plain tar.gz (yes, a tar.gz in 2013).


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    The file format spec is the program spec.
    It's the history of the program spec, including all the annoying hacks put in to work around weird problems with interop with programs that are now long deceased. I can see why they did it, but the result of this drip-drip of hacks is still definitely WTF-ful. Sometimes you've just gotta take out the trash.

    Microsoft also tend to be rather long-winded in their specification documents. Why use five words when a five thousand will do?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @spamcourt said:
    Have you seen the standard? The main PDF is 5026 pages long (and there's still a few more documents).

    The file format spec is the program spec. I don't know why people continually fail to understand this.

    Look, if Word adds a feature Blah, it needs to have some way of annotating Blah in the file format. So (virtually) each feature added to Word appears as a couple paragraphs in the file format specification. That's fine and good, that's how programs work. Look at the file spec and you have a pretty fucking good idea what the features of the program are.

    The problem comes when people go, "we want to standardize a document format that all word processors should use, and no word processors can use things not in the standard format!" Then you've effectively stopped software innovation in its tracks by listing a standard set of features all word processors *must* have (otherwise they can't be compatible with the file format), and if that wasn't bad enough, you've also prohibited the word processor from implementing any features *not* in the file format spec.

    So you want to write a new word processor because you have some idea for a brand new feature? Well: tough shit. You can't publish until it supports the standard file format (meaning, you've implemented 340,000 features that you have no interest in), and you can't save in the file format when you're done with your shiny new feature, because nothing else that reads the format would have a way of understanding it. Unless you publish your shiny new feature to the format spec, now every other word processor on Earth not only *can* steal your competitive advantage, but they *must* steal your competitive advantage to remain compatible with the file format.

    Microsoft's spec is big because Word has a lot of features. OpenOffice's is small because OpenOffice has relatively few features.

    The OOXML people, by claiming all word processors should share the same file format but can compete on features, are way out in la-la-land. What competitive feature doesn't involve altering the file format? Maybe a better spell checker? Maybe? It's a fucking ridiculous concept, and the fact that the EU government throws their sissy euro-weight behind it only proves the point further-- "well it makes no sense, but it might make headaches for an American corporation, and since the entire purpose of the EU at this point seems to be making headaches for American corporations, let's pass it! That's much easier than actually fucking competing in the economy."

    #LeftoverRantsFromTheOOXMLDebate

    +1. The sad thing is, people will still find some way to argue with this.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    The problem comes when people go, "we want to standardize a document format that all word processors should use, and no word processors can use things not in the standard format!" Then you've effectively stopped software innovation in its tracks by listing a standard set of features all word processors must have (otherwise they can't be compatible with the file format), and if that wasn't bad enough, you've also prohibited the word processor from implementing any features not in the file format spec.

    So you want to write a new word processor because you have some idea for a brand new feature? Well: tough shit. You can't publish until it supports the standard file format (meaning, you've implemented 340,000 features that you have no interest in), and you can't save in the file format when you're done with your shiny new feature, because nothing else that reads the format would have a way of understanding it. Unless you publish your shiny new feature to the format spec, now every other word processor on Earth not only *can* steal your competitive advantage, but they *must* steal your competitive advantage to remain compatible with the file format.

    And suddenly the idea behind the pairing of HTML for marking up content in semantical structure and CSS for slathering on the presentation starts to make an amazing amount of sense.

    It's kind of sad that CSS already specifies a lot of the base requirements for fully blown paged document presentation and has had them specified for years, but browser vendors continue to skip over implementing it all. (Even with the new exclusions and flows specs pushed by Adobe you rarily see mention of print / paged documentation.)



  • @blakeyrat said:

    What competitive feature doesn't involve altering the file format?
    You of all people should know: a better interface.

    Or maybe you're not considering that to be a feature, as far as the current discussion is concerned.

     



  • @Ragnax said:

    It's kind of sad that CSS already specifies a lot of the base requirements for fully blown paged document presentation and has had them specified for years, but browser vendors continue to skip over implementing it all.

    That's why I'm in favor of descriptive web standards over prescriptive ones. Examples of descriptive standards include XMLHttpRequest, the canvas tag, and querySelector.

    Besides, when we do get an implementation of fully blown paged document presentation it'll probably have -webkit- or -moz- or whatever plastered onto it.



  •  My favourite part of the 30-days claim behind the software is that it's Open Sourced and as such anybody can clearly see that the First commit was in February, and it has been getting commits all the way up to this week. If he shows the CURRENT program and says "I wrote this in 30 days" he's a fucking liar.



  • @BC_Programmer said:

     My favourite part of the 30-days claim behind the software is that it's Open Sourced and as such anybody can clearly see that the First commit was in February, and it has been getting commits all the way up to this week. If he shows the CURRENT program and says "I wrote this in 30 days" he's a fucking liar.

    Maybe it's 30 days of waiting for disk IO. Who says sleeping has to count in development time?



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    @Ragnax said:
    It's kind of sad that CSS already specifies a lot of the base requirements for fully blown paged document presentation and has had them specified for years, but browser vendors continue to skip over implementing it all.

    That's why I'm in favor of descriptive web standards over prescriptive ones. Examples of descriptive standards include XMLHttpRequest, the canvas tag, and querySelector.

    Besides, when we do get an implementation of fully blown paged document presentation it'll probably have -webkit- or -moz- or whatever plastered onto it.

    XMLHttpRequest is the name for something that rarely uses XML and doesn't require HTTP. One out of three ain't bad!



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    Besides, when we do get an implementation of fully blown paged document presentation it'll probably have -webkit- or -moz- or whatever plastered onto it.
     

    What's the prefix Google's using for their fork of Webkit?  -goog-?  -chrome-?

     


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