Okay, let's go, it's me again.
Somebody just throws some, I don't know, vegetables at me if the ten minutes are over.
If you came for a WebAssembly here, I have to disappoint you, so we'll have to wait another
one or two talks when we will talk about that.
I re-purposed the slot here to talk a little bit about something equally cool, wonderful,
spiffy with a rocket engine for liberal office templates.
Well, small disappointment, it's about Walmux, but I think it's, I'm kind of serious there,
that perhaps the name, we could think about a different one.
So quick intro, what is that if you haven't heard about it?
It's a Java extension to liberal office and it's there for template and forms management
and also like extending mail merge.
So those are two views on it, the left one is the sidebar extension, you see three sidebar
panels been added there.
This is just a selection of sample templates there.
And the right side is the kind of constructed, generated document out of that thing.
So and all of that has been developed by the city of Munich starting around 2005-2006-ish
under the Linux project umbrella, why, because they wanted to migrate to open office, they
wanted some template management and there was nothing that was powerful enough.
So they did what you do when it's not there and you do open-sourced stuff, you started
doing something yourself and then open-sourced it.
So that's what Munich did and there was some, well it was in production I think since 2008
and there was some major upgrade to liberal office from open office which had some, we
had to change some UNO stuff there and another major rework migrating from Java swing dialogues
and UI to native liberal office UI and mostly sidebar which really nicely integrates as
you've seen before.
And this year or end of last year, since the Linux project is kind of sunsetting the extension
itself which is extremely powerful, lovely, great, also cool for QA because it triggers
really literally every little corner of the writer UNO API there, moving house to CDF.
And what is it in the first place, it's predominantly for let's say very complex document generation
workflows that you will find in larger companies, perhaps also in law firms or something but
predominantly in the public sector.
The idea behind there is kind of assemble your letter on the fly and employ the dry
principle and only ever have one stylistic element or part of the template defined once
and then you kind of include that like PHP or other template programming languages so
you kind of piece that together, there's also like loops and control flow statements that
you can use to kind of very dynamically generate forms.
There's a forms generator so you can kind of have some user guidance like where to fill
in what and pre-fill things and also dynamically kind of say oh when this is on then do that
or not to do that or disable here.
As I said, mail merge stuff and yeah this text programming and quotes content based
directors doing something very dynamic.
Okay so that thing is now has moved to CDF end of last year and we have been quite busy
first of all like doing the move and also like doing some adaptations and adjustments
and getting a kind of fit for let's say an international open source project like LibreOffice.
What happened, Git repose moved to under the LibreOffice project on GitHub which was an
easy like click so the old URL still work, you got a redirect that's pretty nice feature
on GitHub so everybody can still, who had this clone can still work with it but the
official location is now there.
We added some translation workflow stuff, we made the Java like everything that it was
a user visible string and the Java sources is now in PO files.
We put this on TDS web late so the UI can be translated.
We moved the documentation from a mark down Git based workflow into Media Wiki which is
also much nicer than to translate for the community, for this mark down stuff, essentially
needed some kind of developer setup to do that and Media Wiki has really nice, excellent
translation support meanwhile.
Fixed a number of bugs, made sure that it actually works not just with all the LibreOffice
versions but with the most recent ones.
We did some build fixes on the, there was some bits of the internal build system kind
of leaking through that still so we made it actually build out of the box so you clone
that, you build that with Maven and it actually works.
Some tweaks with namespaces so we can then upload artifacts to the LibreOffice Maven repository
and it doesn't have the old names anymore that were sometimes internal to City of Munich.
We set up Jenkins drops so we can actually not only run tests on pull requests, we can
also run releases there on the CI and tons of smaller things like started to do comment
translation in the code, renamed variable names, got the build houses and other auxiliary
documentation translated to English.
It's not done, in particular the code stuff, that's not done.
Part of that was already English but that's quite a bit left.
Which gets us to next steps and the possible future.
So handbook is not fully line of super clean, the original handbook was German so we translated
it to English and then we wanted to reuse the old German translation because why do
that work again and with the Bickey markup so that's kind of busy work there and we're
kind of still mostly, we're still busy with that.
I guess help appreciate it but no, okay so we get it done in the very near future.
Some renaming for the Java packages, that kind of blocks each other with possibly renaming
the project, we don't want to rename it twice, have some new landing page done, some more
bug fixing, there's still some side bar, not so nice things and some thing that was one
crash somewhere and then we want to reasonably soonish have some release there so that people
actually can use that.
If anybody's interested, we can have some snapshots possibly published, then again it
should be relatively easy to build and if it's not, let's fix it.
So actually maybe not publishing snapshots far and wide is a feature, not a bug, so we
can fix the build system, yeah renaming.
So we kind of brainstormed a little bit in the background, those are three suggestions
that we will probably mull over and think about, so this LibreOffice template tool or
template engine is probably what it actually is.
So people would understand what it does when they see that somewhere.
This forms and templates is a bit more ambitious because it does much more than just templates,
but hey, naming is hard.
So yeah and if you're curious come and help, so there's some easy hack there for comment
translation, that's the easiest thing to get your feet wet.
There are certainly more like UI and document translation, that would be great and of course
if you have cool feature ideas, go get it implemented.
So there's one thing, there's an old branch about QR code support, so you can kind of
generate QR code and insert it like in this process of programmed software controlled
template generation, that would be nice to get in or other things that people want in
templates these days, and that's it, thanks so much.