IBM and Sun Microsystems today announced the launch of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) Toolkit Union, a new open-source software community project organized to make document software more innovative, versatile and useful for business. The ODF Toolkit will use an initial software code contribution from Sun to provide developers with an easy-to-use Application Programming Interface (API) for reading, writing and manipulating ODF documents while accelerating additional application development.

IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Google, Novell, Red Hat, US Department of Defense, Belgian Fedict, South Africa Dept of Science and Technology, and others collaborate to deliver true data interoperability for office applications.

OASIS has formed a new group to help implementors create applications that conform to ODF. The new OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance (OIC) Committee will work to ensure that the growing number of ODF-compliant applications are able to interoperate and conform to the standard.

Members of the OASIS ODF Adoption TC and the new OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC will meet and participate in a full day workshop on November 6, 2008 in Beijing.

Confirmed participants include:

Mirasol Op'nWorks publishes version 1.0 of the OdfChartBuilder Java™ API on SourceForge

The OdfChartBuilder API can be used to read and render chart descriptions from an Open Document Format file.

Chart rendering uses the JFreeChart API. It can also make use of one of the two following industry standard ODF Java™ APIs: odfdom or odf4j.

Access the OdfChartBuilder page on SourceForge.