Why a Docker image?

Several reasons.

1. With the Docker Image of Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) home users can easily get their own online Office Suite up and running at home
2. We want people to hack this code and play with it. Doing that live on a server used by tens of thousands of other people seems unlikely to be a good idea – right?
3. We would prefer not to be hosting many tens of thousands of concurrent users – we have no desire to compete with our partners whose core competence is doing exactly that.
4. Isolating everything into a Docker Image makes it easy for us to package and update everything in a consistent lump, and it makes it rather easier and safer for you to consume. You can upgrade your FSS solution, fiddle with your database, and so on all without any risk to the rest of your data.

Where can I find out more about the technical architecture?

Clearly the code provides the canonical version of everything. However – here is some basic overview. The code splits into four pieces:

LibreOfficeKit

This is the API that allows the re-use of the bulk of the existing LibreOffice code. It exposes a simple abstract API to allow loading, saving, and rendering documents to image tiles, and also exposes an event based editing core. This piece lives in the main core.git module of LibreOffice.

Web Services daemon

This manages incoming session traffic, services cached document tiles, and spawns LibreOfficeKit client instances, setting up heavily locked down chroot jails for them. The code for this piece lives in loolwsd/ inside online.git.

JavaScript / NodeJS

This code is built on leaflet and provides the front-end, toolbars, and rendering the document contents as it runs in the web client, it lives in the loleaflet directory in online.git.

FSS integration

Clearly on its own CODE is not terribly useful – so make sure you integrate it with your preferred FSS cf. above. The FSS implements a protocol such as WOPI to serve your document data, and integrate with its existing authentication mechanism.

So is this a new Office Suite written in Javascript?

In a word – no. This is LibreOffice brought to your browser in a new and interesting way. There are many good reasons not to duplicate, re-write and re-debug eight million lines of C++ into many millions of lines of JavaScript. Indeed – we have the opposite direction, of trying to minimise the amount of custom Javascript, and to share as much code as humanly possible with the PC and Mobile versions. There are also serious questions about how quickly it would be possible to JIT and execute such a large volume of Javascript – even if it were created, the problems of maintaining two diverging code-bases and synchronizing them is a well known nightmare, and finally – ongoing development is already hard in type-safe C++ with many extra compiler, safety checks; moving to type unsafe Javascript would make things unmaintainable. Instead by re-using the existing LibreOffice code we get huge benefits in terms of rendering and layout fidelity with existing ODF and proprietary file formats. So what you see on your Tablet, Browser and PC (Linux, Windows, Mac) should be identical – absent unusual and non-embedded fonts.

Known issues

There are a number of known issues that are hard for us to fix in CODE. These include copy & paste – while we can provide rich eg. RTF content for selections from the server to the browser, existing browser APIS are extraordinarily unpleasant (to the point of un-usability) for copy/pasting rich content – as such, we do plain text copy/paste.

Why didn’t you fix my bug yet for free?

Please feel free to join our efforts in making this the best Online Office Suite. We’re working hard to make the CODE better, but more help is always welcome. Learn more in “Participate in the project”.

Is this all Free Software / Open Source?

Yes, of course. That was easy wasn’t it: Open First.

Where is the roadmap?

The development edition, aimed at home users, contains the latest and greatest developments and things are moving fast, but there is no published roadmap. If you want features delivered to your schedule then you’re looking for the commercial edition of Collabora Online. Having said that – clearly we are currently doing only basic editing (with shared editing), the next focus will be Collaborative editing, and then richer editing – however, that depends on who gets involved.

Can I re-use your screenshots & content for my blog / article?

Yes naturally, please use this page’s content under some CC0 license / Public Domain as long as you respect our trademark, we love to get the message out.

• CODE logo
• Writer screenshot
• Calc screenshot
• Impress screenshot

Who did the work?

CODE is built on top of a huge volume of work from both LibreOffice (credits) and is built on top of Rich Documents plugin (credits), however the Online functionality was created primarily by Collabora (as announced in 2015) – read more about the story of that here. And thanks to Lukas Reschke for help with the docker image.

Also, check out the huge amount of work done for last year’s release of CODE 2.0.

What are the latest updates?

The Docker Image for home users is regularly updated. Keep an eye out on our blog or twitter feed for news of changes.

Latest updates

• January 26, 2016 – Shared Editing, Transitions and animations presentations and other improvements.
• February 25, 2016 – Spreadsheet improvements, Usability and other improvements.
• April 25, 2016 – Admin Control Panel, Spreadsheets improvements and more.
• June 2, 2016 – Improved shared editing, header menus, context menus, inserting tables, inserting comments, Impress layouts… and much more!.
• June 23, 2016 – Possibility to run loolwsd behind a proxy, Better localization, buxfixes,….
• July 4, 2016 – ‘Help’ in the menu, Translations, first revision history sidebar.
• July 19, 2016 – New docker image, Collabora Online 5.1, Status bar features.
• September 15, 2016 – Resizeable rows and columns by mouse in Calc and SSL termination support for reverse proxies.
• October 13, 2016 – UI improvements: see who is viewing the document, new menu items and bugfixes.
• October 27, 2016 – Several improvements and CODE in Pydio.
• November 2, 2016 – CODE 2.0 released
• November 11, 2016 – Inclusion of Noto font family, improved Writer format menu, page size and orientation, WOPI updates and bugfixes.
• January 5, 2017 – Insert Special Characters, Initial support for IME (allowing to type in, for example, Chinese), API updates and many stability and bug fixes.
• January 25, 2017 – Responsive design, updated translations, UI and stability fixes
• February 10, 2017 – Pivot Table refresh, Fixed cell alignment commands, updated translations and improved performance
• March 10, 2017 – Minimized UI for readonly documents, reconnect silently, updated translations and stability fixes
• May 4, 2017 – Collabora Online 2.1 and CODE 2.1 released
• May 23, 2017 – Collabora Online 2.1.1 and CODE 2.1.1 released
• June 21, 2017 – Collabora Online 2.1.2 and CODE 2.1.2 released
• August 22, 2017 – Collabora Online 2.1.3 and CODE 2.1.3 released
• October 9, 2017 – Collabora Online 2.1.4 and CODE 2.1.4 released
• November 15, 2017 – Collabora Online 2.1.5 and CODE 2.1.5 released
• December 21, 2017 – Collabora Online Development Edition 3.0 released
• March 2, 2018 – Collabora Online and CODE 3.1 released
• April 19, 2018 – Collabora Online and CODE 3.2 released
• June 29, 2018 – Collabora Online and CODE 3.3 released
• July 6, 2018 – Collabora Online and CODE 3.3.1 released
• October 10, 2018 – Collabora Online and CODE 3.4 released

Changes and improvements

If you have any suggestions for changes or have ideas for improvements, please contact us at hello@collaboraoffice.com.