OpenOffice - BootstrapException: no office executable found!

I was working on building (via mvn) an open office based tool for extracting images from powerpoint. But upon invocation I was getting the following

[amitava@lamp target]$ ./run.sh --extract --input pptsample.ppt --output-dir /tmp/foo 
com.sun.star.comp.helper.BootstrapException: no office executable found!
 at com.sun.star.comp.helper.Bootstrap.bootstrap(Bootstrap.java:253)
 at edu.umich.med.umms.OpenOfficeUNODecomposition.main(OpenOfficeUNODecomposition.java:106)

Turns out, OO sdk wants you to reference the sdk jar's at the install location. I had to change the classpath like so

OO=/usr/lib64/openoffice.org/program/classes
CP=$CLASSPATH:./dcp-0.1.jar:$OO/juh.jar:$OO/jurt.jar:$OO/ridl.jar:$OO/unoil.jar
java -Djava.ext.dirs=./dependency -cp $CP edu.umich.med.umms.OpenOfficeUNODecomposition "$@"

This thread pointed me to the solution.