Office Addins, why do you need to host an app?

1 points by raidicy 8y ago ↗ HN

I was initially pretty keen on hearing about using Office apis with JavaScript but I'm pretty confused; Why do they need to be hosted? I could see this being interesting if you had some external machine learning or other resource intensive application that you wanted to run in the cloud. But for apps not of this nature, and even simple extensions, it seems over kill.

Doesn't this mean that you always have to be online for any of your Add-ins to work?

I guess I'm not seeing a huge difference between embedding a webpage in an excel file or using nodejs to use an api.

1 comment

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chatmasta 8y ago ↗

From what I’ve read, the beta is using a lightweight browser to run the JS but later versions will use a native JS engine.

The JS is loaded externally because that allows add-ins to be referenced by url in the .xls XML, which means they can be managed via a process similar to a package manager. Along with opt-in installation of add-ons, that’s definitely more secure and update friendly than, e.g. packaging the JS into the excel files themselves.

But to be fair, it does seem like you should be able to compile your JS and host it in a public repo on the MS website, just like you can host an npm package on the npm website.