Re: [dev] Making the ODF Toolkit up-to-date

hi Axel,

On 09/05/2025 04:13, axh wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I wanted to use ODF Toolkit to add ODF support to a library project. I have some pain with its 
> current state, so I thought it might be worth fixing those.
>
> - to make ODF Toolkit fully compatible with „recent“ Java versions (i.e., Java 11+), module 
> descriptors are needed (not just automatic module names)

there was some work towards this, but it got stuck on some external 
dependency that was (at the time, at least) not prepared for modules, or 
at least we couldn't figure out how to get it to work (forgot the 
details...)

please see
https://github.com/tdf/odftoolkit/issues/54

> - the current code relies heavily on the flawed and outdated old date and time classes, these 
> should be replaced by the classes under java.time (of course while keeping the interface compatible 
> for users who still use the old classes)

yes most of this code is from 2008-2010 times so could use some 
renovations...

> - important features are missing, for me that’s mainly proper support for merged cells
>
> - if possible, the required Java version should be raised to Java 17 to be able to write more 
> concise code

i guess so, otoh users may be stuck on older LTS Java versions... that's 
actually difficult for us to know...

> - probably many dependencies have to be updated to more recent versions, alone to avoid conflicts 
> with applications using newer major versions of the same dependencies (but I have not really looked 
> into the dependencies yet)

i believe dependencies should be reasonably up to date, years ago Svante 
 set up a Snyk bot that sent us lots of PRs...

> Before putting too much work into this, what are the chances for each of above points to be 
> accepted into the code base?

generally speaking yes, as long as we can remain to a large extent API 
compatible... (i think if there is a good reason we can do some API 
changes but we should not require users to substantially rewrite their 
applications).

> About me: I have been a developer for more than 25 years, switched to almost exclusively using Java 
> in 2008. I am a Committer to Apache POI and rather regular contributor to other Apache projects, 
> currently mainly PDFBox. Also author of a bunch of my own OSS projects (one of which is the reason 
> to step up here) and one of the maintainers of a widely used Gradle plugin.

oh that's good to hear, i think we may have some open bugs related to 
Apache dependencies :)


> Cheers,
> Axel

regards,
 michael



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