GPL Java to smooth business app integration: developers

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OpenOffice's implementation of pivot tables and support for some live data sources are also Java-dependent, Hiser says. And those live data sources are essential for a new generation of business applications that connect desktop applications to Java-based server software. "The productivity leap is spectacular," says Gary Edwards, a partner in development firm OpenStack Business Systems and a founding member of the Oasis OpenDocument technical committee.

Edwards worked on a data interchange project for advertising sales at Comcast, and used Apache Tomcat-based portal software speaking the Jabber protocol to pull data including Nielsen ratings and pricing from a wide collection of server sources and use it to populate OpenOffice Impress presentations. Sales people went from taking three to six weeks to turn around a new version of a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation to an hour with the new system.

The same kind of workflow is what Microsoft offers with current releases of its Office, Exchange, and SharePoint products, and vertical applications in many industries are increasingly using Exchange and SharePoint as a platform, Edwards says. Microsoft currently has an edge in integration, Edwards says, because Microsoft's XML data design is the same across the company's office and back-end applications. Development that connects OpenOffice to Java business applications now requires more custom coding.

But committing a business application to Microsoft's proprietary standard is a risk. "I realized that Microsoft was building a very important point in the processing chain that's more of a lock-in than file formats," Edwards says. "The value of .NET is to bring in the libraries that can speak MSXML." And developers of vertical applications like what Edwards calls the "Microsoft information processing chain and productivity story."

"There are lots of things that don't work quite right on the open source stack," Schuessler says. Finally bringing Java into the GPL umbrella holds the promise of a chance to fix them.