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Web-based spreadsheets with OpenOffice.org and Dojo

As functionality traditionally associated with desktop applications moves to the Web, developers are looking for new ways to handle that computational heavy lifting on the server side. But if you need to create a Web-based application that behaves like an office suite, there's no need to reinvent the wheel: the open source OpenOffice.org suite can actually serve as the powerhouse behind a Web application. In this article, you'll learn how to combine OpenOffice.org and Dojo to create a simple Ajax-based spreadsheet application much like Google Spreadsheets.

Many Web applications these days aim to replace a corresponding desktop application in one way or another. For instance, most Web grids and tables, such as those in Google Spreadsheets, essentially mimic desktop office spreadsheets. In this article, you'll learn about the server capabilities of the OpenOffice.org office suite, which enable it to work as a back end for any Web application that provides functionality usually found in office suites. OpenOffice.org can work with files saved in the OpenDocument format, as well as most of the file formats used by Microsoft Office.

OpenOffice.org is more a platform than a single application. Due to its GPL licensing, a number of office products use OpenOffice.org code under the hood, most notably Star Office, Lotus Symphony, and NeoOffice. (Although Star Office was ultimately the parent of OpenOffice.org, the current version is actually a derivative of the OpenOffice.org codebase.) Since all of the OpenOffice.org derivatives share the same component model, the principles in this article could apply to any of them, though we'll focus on OpenOffice.org.

Read the complete article by Oleg Mikheev and Doan Nguyen Van in JavaWorld.

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