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drummerboof
drummerboof

Reputation: 1

OpenOffice in server mode with PHP on Windows

I am working on a project which requires me to generate documents as docx and then convert to doc and pdf.

This project is written in PHP (using Zend Framework) and running on IIS on Windows (client requirements - definitely not my choice!).

I am researching the ways in which I can carry out the document conversion (including the LiveDocx service) and am currently looking into using OpenOffice running as a service to convert the documents.

I have a PHP script which works -- it is similar to the code in this post How do I convert RTF to PDF from my PHP web page using OpenOffice? -- but I wanted to know how well this will scale. the PHP script is basically a PHP version of the PyOD converter using PHP's COM functions. On this page (http://code.google.com/p/jodconverter/wiki/GettingStarted) it specifically says that the PyOD script is not intended for to work with multiple concurrent connections. I would therefor assume that the PHP script will be equally unsuitable.

Having read around, it seems that the OpenOffice process which is running will only support one connection at a time. Is this definitely correct? If so then am I right in thinking that it is simply not a viable solution? I would be expecting high usage for the product so concurrent conversions are a must. Does anyone have any experience with this in a production environment?

In finishing, does anyone have any other recommendations for carrying out the conversions? If not, I will go back to using the LiveDocx service. My only real gripes with it were speed and some inaccuracies with the conversions.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1260

Answers (1)

Paul Jowett
Paul Jowett

Reputation: 6581

You probably can scale OpenOffice to do what you require. Having done work directly with the OpenOffice UNO api in the past, you might find you have a lot of work to do though. Trying to use a single OpenOffice process in a multithreaded-fashion only lead me to grief. You can however spawn several OpenOffice processes and single-thread each. It depends on what your performance criteria are as to whether this is going to be scalable enough...

JODReports and Docmosis sit over OpenOffice so it might be worth trying one of these systems out to see if you could potentitally scale to what you require before investing any development effort yourself with the particular technologies. You might also look at LibreOffice which has evolved a little further recently than OpenOffice.

Hope that helps.

Upvotes: 0

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