Hackweek

Taobao is a biggest online retail marketplace for consumers in China. Founded by parent Alibaba Group, it facilitates transactions between individual consumers and a wide range of sellers such as retailers, wholesalers, and other individuals. Similar to eBay, sellers are able to post new and used goods for sale on the Taobao marketplace either through a fixed price or negotiated sale or by auction. Primary competitors include eBay, yet reports have shown that Taobao has over 80% of the C2C market in China.

It was hackweek in Novell last week. I decided to make a Taobao extension in OpenOffice.org to facilitate Taobao users manager their transaction data including what they bough and what they sold. So that it could attract more people to use OpenOffice.org for it is reported that Taobao has over 100 million users in China. :-)

Firstly, I need to learn the Taobao Open Platform(TOP) which provides API to manager the business in Taobao. I wrote some example to learn how to use these API to get the transaction data of the user's bough and sold.

Secondly, I also need to spend some time learn how to make an extension in Java. And I found some examples to see how to make a custom menu and dialog in Openoffice.org SDK.

Finally, I got a prototype that could import the transaction data from Taobao into Spreadsheet.

See the above sceenshot, a custom menu "Taobao" is added into Calc.
When "Taobao"->"Buy" is click, your bough data is imported in the spreadsheet.

Actully, this is just a demo, not a final version. I will improve this extension and upstream the codes and binary extension into Google project oootaobao.