java - How can I use OpenOffice in server mode as a multithreaded service?

Question

What is the experience of working with OpenOffice in server mode? I know OpenOffice is not multithreaded and now I need to use its services in our server.
What can I do to overcome this problem?

I'm using Java.

Answer 1

With the current version of JODConverter (3.0-SNAPSHOT), it's quite easy to handle multiple threads of OOo in headless-mode, as the library now supports starting up several instances and keeping them in a pool, by just providing several port numbers or named pipes when constructing a OfficeManager instance:

final OfficeManager om = new DefaultOfficeManagerConfiguration()
  .setOfficeHome("/usr/lib/openoffice")
  .setPortNumbers(8100, 8101, 8102, 8103)
  .buildOfficeManager();

om.start();

You can then us the library e.g. for converting documents without having to deal with the pool of OOo instances in the background:

OfficeDocumentConverter converter = new OfficeDocumentConverter(om);
converter.convert(new File("src/test/resources/test.odt"), new File("target/test.pdf"));