Ruby vs. Java vs. TypeScript: my experience on building a Cowork DOCX plugin

Nice to see Ruby vs Java. Must say that in this context Kotlin deserves a mention: my Kotlin code basically looks+feels like Ruby-with-types. Both Ruby and Kotlin are essentially OO, but with "lots of FP features where it makes sense".

On the side of the jpackage: I'm currently using GraalVM compile to native for a Kotlin CLI tool. I do the build in a build container so I use an older glib to ensure compatibility on a wide variety of Linuxes, AND because this way no-one needs to install all the GraalVM requirements by hand. The result is a 57MB binary, that start in a blink of the eye. The downside is long compile times (2 minutes for a simple CLI tool that uses AWS SDK). I think I prefer this of jpackage; but I'm not building a GUI tool.

How is it surprising to people that zip and XML are in stdlibs for a programming language?

Btw, you should have looked at dotnet for this as well. There is a very good library ( DocumentFormat.OpenXml) that can handle all docx/xlsx/pptx files. And dotnet can ship standalone binaries (though AOT probably won't work).

> MCPB

It's annoying when acronyms are used without explanation. It's https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/mcpb , which looks a kind of installation bundle for MCP servers.

There's Apache POI which is intended for working with Office documents, so directly using XML parsers might not be necessary.

The MCPB format seems to be able to run external processes, even if there's a Node in the middle. So you could also compile the Java version to a native binary with GraalVM and ship that as an MCPB.