[Libreoffice] Summary of the discussion on the Alfresco / CMIS connector

[Cedric Bosdonnat]

Hi all,

After some mails exchanges here is a summary of what options we have for
a connector with Alfresco.

 * Status of the OOo plugin from Westernacher
   * Using JDIC to launch web-browser, but that project hasn't moved in
the past 2 years. Using SWT org.eclipse.swt.browser package could be an
option, but SWT is known to have some threading issues with
LibreOffice / OOo.
   * The hackers who wrote that plugin aren't interested in working on
that anymore.
   * Would need some work on the Alfresco side to get some nice
webscripts working for IE and other browsers.

 * Status of the CMIS plugin from Dan Corneanu
   * Browse/open/save/create UCB commands are handled
   * Pretty annoying to debug with the mix of C++ and Java
   * No *ucbhelper* port in the Java Uno binding
   * Developing Java extensions with OOo / LO is still a challenge
(mostly my fault for not progressing recently on the OOEclipse project)
   * Written in Java... not ideal when we want to reduce Java deps.

We think that working on a CMIS content provider is the best thing to do
as it would provide access to Alfresco, but also to any other
CMIS-enabeld server.

We have several options here to start a project like this one:
 * Start writing a new C++ CMIS client library and use it in LO
 * Reuse the Python cmislib from Apache Chemistry project.

For the persons interested in the
 * Dan Corneanu and David Nelson are willing to help hacking on the
project
 * I'ld like to help, but I'll need to find some time to work on it
among all the sw bug fixes and features.
 * Florian Müller (Alfresco and Apache Chemistry chair)  is interested
in seeing a CMIS connector for LibreOffice.

I hope to have properly summarized the talks there. Don't hesitate to
complete them if you see something missing.

Regards,

-- 
Cédric Bosdonnat
LibreOffice hacker
http://documentfoundation.org
OOo Eclipse Integration developer
http://cedric.bosdonnat.free.fr