PEAR's OpenDocument: Status and plans

Hi all, Just a quick mail to inform you what's going on with our OpenDocument package. In the last weeks I've been reading the ODF specification to understand which capabilities are to be expected from a full-featured package. I learned some interesting things, among others that there are two OpenDocument serialization formats: the well-known zip-based multiple-files-in-one-archive format, and one-single-big-xml-file. Since having that single XML file would help debugging a great deal (because one doesn't have to unzip before looking what's wrong), I decided to begin with implementing a generic storage interface and plug the zip and bigxml drivers into that. So far the interface is defined and the zip storage driver is implemented. I've yet to plug it into the actual document generation code. My next step is writing the bigxml driver and finish their integration. Apart from that, I have fixed one bug regarding styles (which didn't work at all for non-paragraph elements) and by finishing the storage, another bug will be squashed. Before releasing a new version - to show progress - the creation of OpenDocument files will need to be brought to a new API, similar to the one we discussed in [1]. Even if there is no actual second document type yet, I am trying to make BC breaks as early as possible. Waiting with that for the next version is - in my eyes - too long, and frustrating for users that use our package after the coming new version. I also found out about alternative PHP implementations: - http://opendocumentfellowship.com/projects/odfphp http://opendocumentphp.org/ This project seems to be dead since 18 months, but has a working implementation for text documents. Personally, I don't like their code structure, plus they don't have e.g. our storage abstraction :) - http://sourceforge.net/projects/ods-php/ This one is a quick-and-dirty hack to generate spreadsheets. Dead as well. That's all. Currently there is no actively maintained package that helps you generating OpenDocument files with PHP. That's what I try to fix. On IRC, I also brought up the question of the common use case. The probably most common use case is generating a document in a serial matter - add first heading, add following paragraph, add another paragraph below that one, add next heading. Most people will never go back and change something. This leads to the question if we really need a DOM-based package, or if e.g. XMLWriter suffices - which would be a huge boost for extremely large files > than RAM. I nevertheless will continue the current DOM-based implementation, because it also offers us read-support. So long. [1] [PEAR-DEV] OpenDocument status / support for multiple document types http://marc.info/?l=pear-dev&m=124452536114633&w=2 -- Regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen Christian Weiske -= Geeking around in the name of science since 1982 =-

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