A servOO module for MODx ?

How often did you encounter issues integrating word processor documents into a website ?
I know I find it painful, involving quite a few steps to get a decent xhtml document...

That’s when servOO comes into play.

ServOO allows publishing large, structured and complex documents on the web easily. It converts documents prepared in a word-processor into XHTML for publication on the web. ServOO is based on OpenOffice.org so support many usual formats, for instance rtf, doc, sxw.

ServOO has been initially developed for Lodel content managment system. Documents converted in XHTML are enriched by ServOO with information about document structure (paragraph style, charater styles). Lodel uses those information to fill automatically fields in the database: title, abstract, authors, etc (try the demo site [french]).

Any Web application can now support this feature using ServOO. The integration is very easy thanks to an object-oriented library in PHP (ServOO client library). The library undertakes the communication with ServOO and processes the XHTML-enriched documents for the web application.

ServOO uses the SOAP protocol and is written in PHP and Java. Conversions are performed by OpenOffice.org and Writer2Latex .

I’d sure like to know what you think about it and if it’s a nice idea for a module...

Quote from: davidm at Oct 17, 2006, 12:12 PM

How often did you encounter issues integrating word processor documents into a website ?
I know I find it painful, involving quite a few steps to get a decent xhtml document...

That’s when servOO comes into play.

I’d sure like to know what you think about it and if it’s a nice idea for a module...

I think it’s a fantastic idea. I always use OpenOffice to convert Word documents into XHTML anyway, since it’s much better at it than Word.

Maybe Lodel’s code could help a developper get started up, since they have it implemented for two years, and from the demo I have witnessed it’s working nice...

You can download Lodel from sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=100377

I would assume, that for serv00 to work, you need a web server that can run java web applications and has open office installed to listen in some port and access rights to it.. am I right? Or it does not have to be the webserver itself, as it uses soap to call the service, but those are needed still..

Yes, indeed you need a web server.

There is a page about installing a servOO server :
http://www.servoo.net/document.php?id=20

Requirements

* PHP 4.3.x or higher. Not tested with PHP 5.
* MySQL 3.23, 4.x or higher.
* Java run-time machine. Tested with J2SE© Sun and JRE for Linux (blackdown.org)
* OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 or higher.
* PEAR package: SOAP and its dependencies.
* Web server. Tested with Apache.

There is a list of public server though, you don’t necessarily need to setup a servOO install.

Hm. Sounds like this would be a nice service to be able to provide, along with the MODx Hosting servers!