Six months after JODConverter 2.2.0, here comes version 2.2.1. This is a maintenance release only, with no major new features. (Well there is one actually: the new Maven 2 plugin. But since it is not yet available in the Maven central repository, it will be officially announced separately in a few days’ time.)
So let’s see what has changed then.
MediaWiki wikitext export
The most significant news for end users is probably the addition of the MediaWiki wikitext format to the pre-configured registry of formats. You need to be running OpenOffice.org 2.3+ for this to work, but it opens interesting possibilities for importing word processor documents directly into a wiki system, be it MediaWiki or “compatible” ones such as JAMWiki.
To make the simple suffix-based format detection mechanism work, wikitext files have been assigned the unique file extension *.wiki.
More detailed error messages
When a conversion fails, most of the time JODConverter only reports a generic “conversion failed” message with a not very helpful ErrorCodeIOException. This is partly due to the OpenOffice.org API, but error messages have now been made a bit more informative. They should always report at least whether the error occurred while loading the input file, or while saving the output file. And in case of a dreaded OpenOffice.org ErrorCodeIOException, report at least the magic error code number that can then be looked up in the OpenOffice.org source code (sigh) to help debugging the most difficult issues.
Access to low level OpenOffice.org API and properties
For people familiar with the OpenOffice.org API, class OOoConnection now exposes a few low-level objects (bridge, serviceManager, componentContext) that can be used to interact directly with OpenOffice.org.
Additionally the new class OpenOfficeConfiguration offers utility methods to read configuration properties at runtime, including the OpenOffice.org version and locale. (Thanks to Laurent Godard for this contribution.)
