KOffice not opening as well as AbiWord

I forgot to say that you can use ThinkFree Office: http://haikuware.ru/software/tf4installer it also include a slideshow features through "Show" :-)

As far as I know, OpenOffice is a porting nightmare. LibreOffice, being a fork, has the same problem. Best to port something that uses an abstraction library anyway.

It uses its own custom library, and so porting that library would not allow any other apps to run on Haiku. And besides that, it requires a very large number of 3rd-party libraries to run as well.

Ah, that's a shame. I am a huge fan of LibreOffice, it's installed on all my computers and laptops at home. Hopefully as Haiku nears R1, the folks at LibreOffice could be convinced to help port it over. I think that would be a huge coup for the Haiku team. One can dream I suppose. =)

I think he meant ThinkFree Office needs Java.

I was referring to ThinkFree, not open/libreoffice.

While I'm with you on not being a fan of java (I'm a C/C++/prolog programmer), particularly on haiku where I'd much prefer native C++ apps, I have to say that some of those points aren't exactly true.

In theory JIT compiled code can be faster than pre-compiled code, because it can optimise at run time to avoid cache misses etc, but despite this advantage what tends to slow java down is garbage collection and poor coding.

You can't really do much about poor coding, and it's everywhere in all languages, but maybe more so with java because it's so commonly used for teaching and thus more inexperienced programmers use it.

Security is also VM implementation specific (and to some extent OS specific), and is in no way an inherent weakness of the programming language. VMs sand-box the java programs being run, providing a barrier between the application and the rest of the code running on the machine, and its when this is not done properly that security issues arise. If anything the java language itself is more secure than c and c++, which are (1) prone to all sorts of security issues due to being at a lower level than java, and (2) are _not_ sand boxed.

I also don't see any way that java, or any other software, won't be allowed into the haiku package repository. I mean, you can't refuse something on the grounds that you dont like it!

But that's just conjecture. You'd have to point out specific issues to refuse it, and these are not things you're currently aware of. If you check a few security vulnerability tracking websites (e.g. http://www.eeye.com/resources/security-center/research/zero-day-tracker, http://securitytracker.com/, http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/) you can see that the majority of vulnerabilities are in C/C++ software, with relatively few being in java. And these are past problems that are now fixed, who knows what security problems are currently present in any piece of software? I suppose you could argue that you'll refuse a piece of software if it's track record for vulnerabilities is below a certain level, but what happens when a piece of software that everyone uses goes below that threshold, you just kick it out?

If you google for vulnerabilities in Java, sure you'll find that it has had them, lots of them even. But the same is true of any number of other commonly used pieces of software you might care to google for vulnerabilities in - apache, mysql, flash, nvidia drivers, opera, mozilla, skype, vmware, php and _javascript_, just to name some off of the top of my head.

Maybe javascript is better, who knows? And maybe it will become more popular. They are already both very popular languages. I don't use either so I don't really have an opinion. But a lot of developers use java, and a lot of industry and academia have a big investment in improving it (think of android for one thing) - I think it will take quite some killing to make people stop using it.

Uhm, those guys did write an implementation of java. That would be google, who developed both V8 and the davlik java VM. There are _loads_ of java VMs out there besides the Sun/Oracle implementation (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines).

I guess the point of all this is that you can't fault the language itself for the security of a single VM implementation, particularly when there are so many alternative VMs around. The language itself is not insecure, and is actually inherently way more secure than C/C++ and a host of other languages.

Anyway, we're way off topic here. If you want to continue the discussion you can find me on irc.

For me is clear :-)
But.. Is only a mockup, right? :-)

My own humble opinion is that a word processor is a very high value milestone for Haiku. Having looked at multiple OS office suite projects I have come to the conclusion that AbiWord will probably be the easiest to port in the short term. There are others that have more features, more compatibility, more BeOS-ness, but I think AbiWord might be the best one to start with, to get something decent running.

Recently there have been some talented guys bringing some much needed ports to Haiku (Thank you Giova!). If someone felt ambitious, here's where to start with AbiWord:
From an email:

Martin Edmund Sevior <martines@unimelb.edu.au>

I made the official request, but they are understaffed and declined.

Kingsoft Office (aka KSOffice aka WPS Office) is proprietary software and thus can only be ported by the company behind it. They are unlikely to want to do that.

Not only are abisource understaffed (or should I say they have enough on their plate already), but the BeOS/openBeOS community in 2004 was 20 times the size it is now. Further in 2002, the community was well over 100 times the size it is now. Online communities are getting larger, not smaller. So even if the community got to the some size it was in 2002, it would still be no where as important as it was when the abiword port was first started.

No matter how altruistic people claim to be, people always want something in return for doing something. The team at abisource clearly feel that a Haiku port of abiword would bring them no real gain, that it would be great if it was done as part of GSOC or by the Haiku community, but that they have no interest in doing it themselves.

It is a bit like asking the Haiku devs to invest a lot of time into getting Haiku to run on the PPC Genesi Pegasos. It would great, but their are much bigger fish to fry; namely R1.