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OpenOffice Coder On StarOffice 6.0's Beta Release
"Release 6 also gets rid of the old Star Office desktop of version 5 which was generally disliked for its annoying tendency to cover up all of the other windows you were working with and make it difficult to interact with your X Window Manager.
The application suite has programable APIs for each of the applications, exposed through a custom object request broker named UNO. In an impressive demonstration, Max showed live update of a spreadsheet with real-time stock data, all under the control of a small Java application. Changed data were reflected throughout the spreadsheet table with each update as the sheet recalculated each cell based on the new input.
Max freely admits that there are still weaknesses in the code. He pointed to the ten year lifespan of the mostly C++ code base, and hopes to see the code improved with the use of more modern C++ features. In browsing through the source tree I don't find that the code is in nearly as bad shape as Max portrayed it. Admittedly I've only seen a tiny fraction of the code (at 3.7 million lines, OpenOffice is by far the largest open source project in the world), but my random sampling showed very good coding practises, like preprocessor guards around each header include to reduce compile time due to reopening headers that have already been processed. Even with these measures in place however, the full system takes upwards of 15 hours and 1.5GB of disk to build on currently available hardware.
System load time for the office suite has been significantly reduced (about 20s on Max's 500MHz laptop with 128MB memory) by removing several libraries from the link process and instead loading them on demand. Over the next year or more Max hopes to see more modularization of the code base with the eventual goal of seperating the monolithic program into seperate applications linked together through an object request broker.
Q&A went on until we got kicked out of our room, so there is a lot more that is new about OpenOffice than I've described here. If you are interested you can pick up a copy at OpenOffice.org, or at one of its mirrors around the world."
If it has been, openoffice.org sure doesn't know about it. All that is available for download are some "recent builds" with not "W00t! First Release!" hysteria anywhere. Maybe the title should have been "OpenOffice guy interviewed, betas available". But that might be expecting too much from poor Timothy.. I mean, he'd have to actually follow a link!
Open Office 6 was not released on wednesday. They released a build called Open Office 6 beta 638c. It's more like a milestone release on the way to a proper version 6. Sort of like what mozilla does. The final version isn't scheduled for some time yet, see the roadmap.
Staroffice 6.0 beta and Open Office 638C are the same build. Sun simply added some licensed software to it and bundled it. At least that is my understanding.
Ryan
I've not yet gotten the release but I'd have to say OpenOffice is a big improvement in many ways over StarOffice. Unfortunately, the build I got a month ago didn't allow conversion between html docs and swd (or whatever its called now), which really annoyed me. Its a toss up whether loosing that horrid desktop thing is worth it. (I like to publish everything I document as HTML).
It does seem to load substantially faster and run a tad more stable than Star Office did.
All in all I have pretty good luck converting to and from M$ Word. The changes are usually the same types of things that happen when switching the printer settings around on M$ Word.
Unfortunately, I've less luck with the Spreadsheet piece. It writes XLS files in a really weird format (I looked at it via biff view and via my project sourceforge.net/projects/poi) it doesn't always load properly and sometimes crashes excel.
(long story on the differences, too boring for here)...
So can you ditch Office and use OpenOffice -- not if you're a big spreadsheet user that needs to talk to Excel, but for most people -- definately!
(In open office's defence, they use glibole2 which is some of the nastiest looking C code I've ever seen -- see www.gnome.org. You have to expand about 20 layers of macros to even understand one line of code! Its a miracle they can write anything)
...
// Performance Mods (B.G.; Microsoft Inc.)
// openOffice->launch();
// spin cpu to look busy
int main()
{
unsigned long launch_time = gettimeofday()+20;
while(1)
{
if( gettimeofday() == launch_time )
break;
}
openOffice->launch();
}
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
First, as others have noted, this is just another beta.
Having said that, if you want to get the sources, stop Slashdotting openoffice.org and get it from Akamai. At least they've got the bandwidth to deal with the load.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
First of all, excellent to see that OpenOffice is out. The Free software community needs a solid heavyweight office suite with all the bells and whistles, and Open Office is shaping up to be exactly that.
I think we're also seeing the development of two quite distinct niches for Office software, at least on Linux and other Free *nix. Perhaps a little like the split used to be between MS Works and Office:
On the one hand, we have OpenOffice, a big heavyweight that has features pouring out of its ears, but which is not tremendously tightly integrated to any desktop, nor perhaps the most intuitive set of programs to use. It's also heavy on system resources and diskspace, but that's the price you pay for having all the bells and whistles.
On the other hand, there's the younger, lighter suites like KOffice. Leaner, faster, easier, and more tightly integrated with the desktop. At the same time, lacking a few features that may be necessary for some people, but satisfying the needs of an average Joe quite well.
It seems to me there's a place for both of these in the Linux desktop landscape, and frankly, I think this is great.
Or rather, it will be great once they can read each other's file formats ;)
Is there a freedom software distro for Microsoft Windows. Such a thing would be a great boon. They should be everywhere like AOL cd's.
Such a thing should include
OpenOffice, Mozilla, Gimp, Apache(not enabled by default), Perl And so on...
I mean really how many people would buy office XP if they had a shiny "new" cd sitting around with a free compatible equivilent. It is the perfect opportunity to move people to the apps, and then the OS looks much more tempting.
And no most people don't write vbs scripts in word they have enough trouble with fonts and margins.
Could some Linuxish orginiztion pick up the tab for the creation or shipping???
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
I recently had a user with a corrupted MS Excel spreadsheet that would immediately crash Excel every time it was opened. I tried Excel 2000, Excel 97, Excel Viewer, and nothing worked.
So, I tried to open it with the Win32 version of OpenOffice build 638. Hmmm, so far so good - it opened with no problems. I saved it as a native OpenOffice document; reopened it in OpenOffice; and exported it as an Excel document. Finally, I tried to open it with Excel and it worked like a charm!
So if nothing else, OpenOffice makes a nifty file repairer for MS Office documents. ;-)
... sampling showed very good coding practises, like preprocessor guards around each header include to reduce compile time due to reopening headers that have already been processed ...
Um. Like who doesn't do this? Due to the nature of C++, this is required to avoid redefinitions that would otherwise occur on multiple inclusions. Given this, it has little to do with reducing compile time; for that you use pre-compiled headers (support for which isn't expected in GCC until 3.1 or later).To evaluate coding practices, I would look at
Consistent coding conventions: syntax, identifiers, directory layout etc.
Presence of good comments (German ones don't count ;).
Application of good OO principles (which, contrary to a surprising number of people's opinions, apply to all languages, not merely explicitly OO languages like C++), such as encapsulation, modularization, etc.
Application of good OO patterns (GangOfFour-style).
Use of interfaces ("abstract base classes" in Bjarne terminology) to decouple API interfaces from their implementation.
Presence of unit tests.
Presence of assertions and other kinds of code guards that contribute to "self-documenting" and "self-testing" code.
etc.