ODFDOM

OpenDocument API - ODFDOM

ODFDOM is the name of the upcoming free OpenDocument framework sponsered by Sun Microsystems Inc.

It is the succesor of AODL and Odf4j, designed together with their architects to provide the ODF developer community an easy lightwork programming API, meant to be portable to any object-oriented language.

The first pre-version of the Java 5 reference implementation of ODFDOM is planned to be made public under LGPL3 in May 2008.

Overview

The ODFDOM project's objective is to provide an API for easily reading, writing and manipulating ODF documents. ODFDOM implements a layered approach through which documents are accessed.

• The ODF Package / Physical Layer - provides direct access to the resources that are stored in the ODF package, such as XML streams, images or embedded objects.
• The ODF Typed DOM / XML Layer - provides classes for all XML elements. XML attributes are mapped to class attributes. It is a typed DOM as every ODF XML element is represented by a different class. This level is concerned with the representation of the content of the standardized XML streams of the underlying package using the language independent W3C DOM API.
• The ODF Document / Convenient Layer - represents components consisting of multiple underlying XML elements. This level is concerned with usability aids, which are not specified by the ODF standard.
• The Customized ODF Document / Extendable Layer - not part of the delivered API, but part of the design. This level is concerned with user defined customizations.

ODFDOM is part of the odftoolkit project. Development is discussed on the dev@odftoolkit.openoffice.org mailing list.