Linux Development Call To Arms

Hell O'World writes "This ZDNet Article points to the direction that Linux developers need to follow. Many people think that Linux needs an Office clone to gain acceptance, but the truth is that monolithic software is not the future. To get all of the functionality that anyone could possibly need in one place, the Office paradigm is to have everything there at once, and that takes a huge amount of resources to load, and years to learn. Linux will not gain converts by giving users the same thing, that they will then have to relearn. The power of UNIX is in connecting small, fleet-footed tools. What we need now is to create an environment, where users can easily create customized tools for the way they work, and developers can easily add new functionality."

Comments

Office is not a big monolithic blob

[dan the person]

FOr years and years, MS have been made it up from small reusable components. Need to display a graph in Word? Well, word doesn't have spreadsheet program built in, it embeds an Excel component.

Need a graph, well it embeds MS graph. Need an organisation chart? Well there's a seperate reusable component for that.

Re:Office is not a big monolithic blob

[dan the person]

Need to display a mathmatical formula? Well there is the small fleet-footed equation editor component that can be embeded into any OLE capable program, none of these components are tied specifically to Office, they are small reusable components(and reusable from the end users perspective too!)

This is like OpenDoc

[uglyhead69]

Essentially Apple's OpenDoc was the same paradigm. Unfortunately due to business concerns OpenDoc was canned. The tools that were released were VERY useful though. For the short time it was around a was a great way to get work done. With the addition of the power in unix, this paradigm could be very powerful.

You are right!!

[Tofu]

"The power of UNIX is in connecting small, fleet-footed tools. What we need now is to create an environment, where users can easily create customized tools for the way they work, and developers can easily add new functionality."

Here at MUSC, the IT Lab is trying to do exactly that. We are trying to use the web as a way to string together tools and make it as easy as possible for the user. Check out the toolbox for some of the attempts. We are just a small group and any ideas to better our tools would be great!

OpenDoc, NextStep -- GNUStep?

[Blitter]

As others have mentioned, the failed OpenDoc initiative was very much in this vein. NextStep (the "new" Apple initiative, now renamed Cocoa) has long had a reputation of allowing one to quickly string together custom applications from preexisting object classes, making it very popular in businesses that custom made in house applications. It is also worth noting that this framework allows for what are called "Services". Applications can "export" functionality to other applications. So for example you can hilite text in a text editor, then go to the mail services submenu in the system menu and from there tell the mail program to open a new message window with the hilighted item pasted inside. This also enables generalized filters, etc, in some ways like Unix shell pipes.

Of course, it's not open source, but what is GNUStep doing these days?

Re:Bundled/monolithic software

[micromoog]

Something monolithic must be starting, otherwise why does Word take so long to load, even on the fastest machine?

Word 97 takes 4 seconds to load here at work. That's on a P3-600, 128M, running NT4. I've got loads of applications running, including a long-running SQL Server insert query against a million-row test table (that resides on this machine), taking up 100% of the CPU.

And that's before memory caching kicks in . . . if I close it and open it again, it takes ~1.5 seconds.

Say what you will about Word, but it ain't slow.