Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I'm a novice web developer seeking guidance on building a spreadsheet application.

Our goal is to create a platform that replicates the familiar experience of Microsoft Excel, but with the added advantages of online collaboration and secure cloud storage. While Google Sheets offers similar features, data confidentiality concerns drive us to explore alternative solutions.

Our proposed system will:

Provide a user-friendly interface that closely resembles offline Excel.
Enable real-time collaboration among multiple users on the same spreadsheet.
Offer secure cloud storage to protect sensitive data.
We're investigating the feasibility of:

Embedding OpenOffice into a web application: Are there proven methods or resources available for this?
Customizing the saved file format: Can OpenOffice be adapted to store data in a database-friendly format like PostgreSQL? Our aim is to optimize data organization and querying by breaking down spreadsheet data into individual records.
Key priorities for our project include:

Performance: Ensuring the system can handle large datasets efficiently.
Security: Implementing robust encryption for data both in transit and at rest.
Scalability: Accommodating growth in user base and data volume.
We believe OpenOffice's capabilities and open-source nature make it a promising foundation for our project.

Would appreciate any insights or recommendations.

Short answer: No.

But before you reinvent the wheel you might take a look at Collabora Online

All you want can be accomplished using Collabora Online which is build on LibreOffice (and started off as LibreOffice online). Have a look at the github page https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online and https://collaboraonline.github.io/
Collabora Online is full FOSS and for a dev it’s quite easy to integrate that in your own file repo/sharing system. Out of the box it’s integrated with quite a few systems already like Nextcloud, Owncloud and quite some commercial solutions (using the Wopi protocol). For that you build it jouw own from github or use like the CODE releases (docker) or use a supported build from Collabora Online so you do now have to deal with building yourself and can focus on the backend and frontend you want the editor to integrate with.
Using this myself with multiple Nextcloud systems and Opentext Filr since a few years so this is a pretty mature solution.
Have fun!

That's an ambitious project! Embedding OpenOffice into a web app is definitely possible. You can explore using LibreOffice Online (based on OpenOffice) which has a REST API and can be integrated into your web app. For customizing the saved file format, you can look into using OpenOffice's UNO API to interact with the spreadsheet data and store it in a PostgreSQL database. For performance, security, and scalability, consider using a cloud-based infrastructure like AWS or Google Cloud, and implement encryption using SSL/TLS and at-rest encryption. You may also want to explore using a real-time collaboration framework like ShareDB or Firebase to enable multi-user collaboration.

Some additional notes as you mention you’re a ‘novice’ dev;
All this together could easily be decades of work (as from what I know the LibreOffice and Collabora Online teams have been working on, still are working on and are discussing for future releases). You might want to just pick a single feature that is important to you and start off with that, like that ‘data exchange with a sql database’. I would advice you to join the weekly collabora meetings where devs and other contributors meet and talk eachother, so to get from them feedback where to start off in this project of yours, find out what’s already in place and what’s not. As an example: Nexcloud does provide filesharing which documents you can edit with Nextcloud Office (Collabora Online), but also has Nextcloud Tables App to create table solutions which are saved in their backend (MariaDB/Postgres/..) database. The Integration Wizard solution can already link to a table (but not limited to) from the document editor, for what i know now yet directly interact (read/write) this data on the fly from the spreadsheet itself. This may be a project to develop that build on exiting technology yet maintained and supported by an existing large community.


Another piece that may be helpful to have a look at is the LibreOffice WebAssembly (LOWA) project which allows LO to run directly as a bindery in a browser, but you’ll be missing (“currently”) the co-editing feature that Collabora Online provides.

For (a)sync co-editing advice to have a look at the ODF Toolkit (especially if you do not want to ho down the Collabora Online path) which implements this largely and for that have a good read into the ins and outs discussed at the LO enhancement request that discusses further enhancing this co-edit feature; I’ll add here and have special attention fot the comments made by Svante/Michael/Thorsten as they have several decades of experience in this area and with OpenOffice/LibreOffice development.
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/sho ... 133984#c24