Bug 35156 - LibreOffice as part of a server application
Summary: LibreOffice as part of a server application
Status: RESOLVED INVALID
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: UI (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
unspecified
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
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Depends on:
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Reported: 2011-03-09 08:25 UTC by mat.rehs
Modified: 2011-03-09 08:36 UTC (History)
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Description mat.rehs 2011-03-09 08:25:47 UTC
Today, the typical use case of a office suite is: You install the software on a system, you bring your files to the systems and you print it from your system.

If you switch from one system to another, you have to do this all over again. Installing, transfer files / synchronize files, set up printers and so on.

It would be a great leap forward, if you have all this stuff on a single machine, with simple access from other machines.

Sure, there is eyeOS and googleDocs. There is a samba filesystem, where you can store your stuff on a single machine. 
But those have also drawbacks. Samba is great, but You have to configure access to your server on every machine.
eyeOS looks good, but it is a mess to install and the GUI looks like a WIN-wannabe.
GoogleDocs is easy to use, but the possibilities of formatting your document is very limited. And at last, it is still a open question who has access to your documents.

So here comes my "what if":

What if, your documents are stored within a "micro cloud". 
A single server or a set of servers which are strictly limited to certain network.
You get access to your docs via an intranet page (somehow like a groupware, but much more easier to use). 
And this also leads to a really platform independent software base. So getting new platforms to the boat would be easy (like iOS, webOS or Android).
And you could find a way to get access to your files from the outside via a VPN tunnel (this should be interesting for companies).

Now, how could this be done?
Because the guts of LibreOffice are Java based, it has to be possible to transfer those to java-applets (theoretically). The Gui has to be change, so that it would be possible to scale the application to smaller screen sizes. And you can also not presume, that the user has a second mouse button.

Sure, this idea is more for a 5.X or 6.X release. And this is more a strategic demand than a feature request. 
But I really think that would be worth the blood, sweat and tears.
Comment 1 Don't use this account, use tml@iki.fi 2011-03-09 08:36:30 UTC
The LibreOffice bug tracker is not the right place for vague discussion about future plans. Use the Document Foundation "discuss" mailing list, see http://www.documentfoundation.org/contribution/ . Once you have actual technical details to talk about, the technical LibreOffice mailing list http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice is a good place for that.

You are very much mistaken if you think "the guts of LibreOffice are Java based". That is not true at all. You can run LibreOffice with much functionality intact without any Java involved at all. Just part of the functionality is implemented in Java. Most of it is in C++, with the core parts written in the 1990s.

As such, you are not saying anything new. Other people have suggested similar things. What nobody has showed is proof-of-concept code. There is no lack of "volunteer visionaries". What we need is actual coders to show that something can be done.