My yesterdays presentation about KOffice Version 2 at the Linuxtag was received overhelming good.

The presentation started with me introducing koffice and telling what's my role within that project. The question what KOffice is was probably answered best with the picture of one of our sprints. Based upon my previous experience with the Linuxtag it was clear that I had to address the technial aspects of KOffice. Our Qt+KDE base, our portability (Windows, OSX, Unix, Haiku, x86 and ARM) and our frameworks (most notable our ODF library, kotext, flake and the textshape as concrete sample).

Then I went on with the interoperability topic. First by providing an introduction about OpenDocument/ODF and the MSOffice filters (2000/2003 binary vs 2007/2010 XML) and then by showing how we solved interoperability between them in KOffice as visualized in the following diagram.

What the diagram shows is the way a MSOffice document takes in KOffice. First the MSOffice filter reads the MSOffice document and translates it into a OpenDocument. Then the OpenDocument is passed on to the KOffice application and then read and finally displayed by the application.

The KOffice applications and libraries are implementing support for OpenDoument and OpenDocument only. That means that any other format, including the MSOffice file formats, is not implemented in the application and libraries themself like the OpenDocument format. That in turn means that other filters either needs to access the applications API direct (not recommed) or they need to output OpenDocument to pass it on to the application (recommed). That, the recommed way, is what the MSOffice import filters are doing. They are reading MSOffice documents and are translating them to OpenDocument to pass the produced OpenDocument on to the application.

This results in a network-effect. Any work done on other filters like those for the MSOffice file format, does also indirectly improve the OpenDocument implementation in KOffice. This is the case cause the filters are producing OpenDocument and are testing our OpenDocument implementation and are then either verifying that things are working as expected or are showing bugs that need to be fixed.

Another positive effect of that design is that we got a clear separation between MSOffice related code and our applications and libraries. The MSOffice related code can focus on transformation between two formats and does not need to provide logic to manipulate documents. The applications and libraries in turn don't need to know anything about other formats or even that there exist other formats. They only care about OpenDocument and OpenDocument only.

Yet there is one more positive thing coming out of this. The MSOffice related code is in itself a rather interesting standalone solution. I am sure that the translation between those both de facto standards is an interesting topic even outside of the KOffice or Linux universes. The code does in fact document the differences between the both ISO standards, a nice read for a raining day.

Later, that is after my presentation, I had a few nice talks with KOffice users, potential new users and potential new developers. Then we hang out a bit at the KDE booth till we left for the social event. Eating, drinking, dancing and after amazing 3 hours sleep in a row I had to catch the train to move on to the KOffice sprint 2010 which takes place this weekend.

Just a short late summary: LinuxTag 2008 was fun and interesting, met some new faces both from openSUSE and KDE communities and many familiar ones. I have uploaded some pictures mostly of the openSUSE and KDE booths. The German "KDE 4.0 auf openSUSE 11.0" talk which me and Will gave on Saturday in the openSUSE track had about 150 listeners, the slides are uploaded like the others on the LinuxTag page in the openSUSE wiki.

This year I was again at LinuxTag, after I missed the one last year. LinuxTag in Karlsruhe was always very nice, the one two years ago in Wiesbaden somehow didn't feel that good, but this time in Berlin it was really great again.

It was a nice event. I arrived late Thursday, just so I could manage to get to the Social Event before midnight. From there we headed to the hotel and next morning the fun started
There were a lot of new people I never met before: Patrick Spendrin, aka Saro Engels (according to him a name from Brave New World), one of our KDE-on-Windows hackers, Claudia Rauch, our KDE e.V. secretary/manager/employee/... (what's the correct job position ?), Alexandra Leisse, who did a great job at organizing LinuxTag for KDE, Roland Wolters aka Liquidat, and we noticed that we both had lived the previous 5 years in Jena without knowing that, Eckhard, Luca, Lydia and of course all the usual suspects

We had KDE running on Linux, Windows and Mac there, I was quite impressed to actually see that working
Friday evening we were invited by Trolltech to a dinner in an Italian restaurant, which was nice, and directly located below a S-Bahn (suburban train), so had that train running all few minutes over our heads.
Saturday LinuxTag ended. I took the chance and talked with some Gnome/gtk guys, and in the end we were talking about CMake again. They are also not really happy with autotools, it would be great if they would join us with using CMake. Beside all the (mainly) KDE devs (but also e.g. VLC devs), here and there we were also talking about version control systems. git seems to be quite popular, Patrick would prefer hg, me too. Also the Gnomes are thinking about VCSs, but won't switch in the near future. Their switch to svn is not that long ago yet.
In the evening we met at a Ubuntu party with BBQ at a canal, which was very nice too.
So now I'm back and have finally catched up with email, so I have time to blog again

Looking forward to Akademy to meet you again
Alex

LinuxTag is a blast. I'm here for the third day, have met a lot of fantastic people, listened to great talks, and had a lot of fun. On Wednesday there was Aaron's KDE 4 keynote, where he also showed the tremendously exciting Marble with OpenStreetMap integration. Yesterday Till talked about Kontact, which now runs on all platforms including Windows. Liquidat has screenshots, or check it out live at the BSI booth. Another fascinating project I saw is the Open Bicycle Computer, a bike computer built from scratch as open project.

Today at 13:30 there is Nat's keynote The future of Linux is software appliances. Go to room London to see it or check out the live stream. It will be worth it

Today there also is the KDE track and tomorrow will be the openSUSE track with more great talks.

Linuxtag excitement!

In two and half weeks the likely biggest Linux Event kicks off: LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin. Four days of exhibition and more talks (the organizers say 240, German/English mixed) than ever before. I plan to be around all the time.

On Wednesday everyone's darling, the multi-headed president of KDE e.V. and the galaxy, Aaron Seigo will give a keynote about KDE4. On Friday is a day-long track with KDE talks, on Saturday is openSUSE day and there are separate talks about Amarok and Kontact planned. Additionally there will be of course KDE and openSUSE booths all the time.

Special tip: one can travel for 59 Euro from everywhere in Germany with ICE to LinuxTag/IT Profits and back.

Yeah, it was only two weeks ago but soon I'll be visiting Berlin again. This time is however only to have some fun in LinuxTag 2007, which, for the first time takes place in Berlin's Messe. KDE will be there and there are lots of interesting talks.