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Information Technology News Linux and Windows interoperability with OpenXML
Information Technology News Linux and Windows interoperability with OpenXML | Linux and Windows interoperability with OpenXML |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Monday, 17 September 2007 | |
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Page 3 of 3 The conversion process is essentially based on performing XSL transformations between the two distinct XML formats, along with necessary pre- and post-processing to manage the zip file packaging and some other housekeeping.Featured Whitepaper
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The applications can be used to allow Microsoft Office to work with ODF documents created by and intended for use by ODF-compliant applications on Linux or other platforms. However, disappointingly, the applications themselves are compiled for 32-bit Windows environments only, and hence only run on that platform. Real-world scenarios With technology like that described here, handling OpenXML within Linux is a snap. We’ve mentioned possibilities for small utilities,and we’ve presented code to produce invoices on the fly. For something more substantial consider some real-world possibilities. A banking example is a commercial bank website allowing its customers the facility to check their current balance and then with a simple click download and open a spreadsheet generated on the fly from the server. This spreadsheet may include all the user’s account data. They may now work with this data and simulate loans or other operations, or sum the interest paid during a financial year or other activities. Similarly, an energy company might provide opportunity for customers to check electricity consumption and download a dynamically-generated spreadsheet with formulas and customer data which can be merged with data from other sources thus realising an ad-hoc analysis. For knowledge workers, an OpenXML app might generate presentations on demand from several slide decks stored on a web server. Presentations can be quickly compiled, adding or removing or shuffling slides as required. OpenXML4J present other scenarios that can be imagined. Now, sure, Microsoft ASP.NET developers can do all these things with the .NET framework and Microsoft Office already. And Linux developers could do all this with other document formats. But, pragmatically, OpenXML opens up the popular and widespread Microsoft Office application to developers and applications worldwide, without imposing any constraints on the server or desktop technology used. A verdant world of interoperability between diverse operating systems is opened up, giving the user a rich user interface and experience. Further reading The Ecma TC45 committee have produced copious amounts of paperwork so you probably wouldn’t want to start explorations into OpenXML with them; instead, OpenXML Explained, the first OpenXML book – an easily-digested 128 page publication – can be purchased or better still downloaded free as a PDF from OpenXMLDeveloper.org. For any person who is keen to produce their own code that works with OpenXML documents – whether consuming or constructing – this is an excellent resource and reference and tutorial all in one. (Now, did we say everyone should adopt OpenXML? No, we said "if you want to work with OpenXML documents, here's some code snippets." - have fun :) |
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