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OpenOffice.org SDK Released
Jules V.D. writes "The OpenOffice.org group on Friday announced a kit that lets programmers build new modules for open-source alternatives to the Microsoft Office suite.This new SDK is an add-on for OpenOffice.org 1.0.2. It provides the necessary tools and documentation for programming the OpenOffice.org APIs and creating your own extensions (UNO components) for OpenOffice.org."The highlight of this SDK is the new Developer's Guide. This comprehensive guide provides, in 900 pages, a detailed description of the OpenOffice.org API concepts, the OpenOffice.org UNO component model and how to use the API in the context of the different application areas.""
Sun have engineers working on it, as do Ximian.
You can check out some of Ximian's work, here.
cheers,
i wish i was but oh well
Seriously, how hard would it to be to put an easy to use interface and reporting engine on top of mysql (or postgre or whatever)?
If you want the desktop database that's part of the suite, you have to pay Sun. That's the only component of the suite they didn't open source.
That said, GNU Enterprise does well, even at its low version, for functionality typical of Access. It'll plug into MySQL and Postgres both, as well as a few commercial databases. Also, if you do a little googling, you'll find a php frontend, and some other stuff. There's plenty of free software out there to fit this need, it's just not bundled in with OpenOffice.org, that's all.
Like what I said? You might like my music
No they didn't.
It is (was) a little known fact that OO can connect to mysql using ODBC. It is just a little hard getting it to work, but you can find info here and here. You can have an access lookalike with OO, ODBC and mysql.
Oh, there is, in OpenOffice calc. Check this article for easter eggs in OSS.
I feel so sig.
May I suggest OpenOffice 1.1 beta with footnote support? Never hurts to peruse their feature list from time to time. Works just fine.
www.ximian.com
I guess the reason Open Office loads so quickly on this machine is that I had "Load OpenOffice.org during system start up" selected in my preferences. I disabled the auto load option. Restarted windows, and then loaded open office. This time the writer program needed almost 12 seconds to start which is closer to cscx's results.
Eh?
Are you suggesting they "componentize" it? That was one of the first things they did. It's even in their FAQ.
From: http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/faq-other.html#12
"A. Differences between StarOffice 5.2 and the future of StarOffice
* The source code has undergone some significant changes since 5.2 was released. Some of these changes are:
o Removal of integrated desktop
o Componentization of word processing, spreadsheet and graphic applications modules
o Removal of email and calendar and the schedule server
o Removal of the browser
o Move to XML-file formats
o Improved Microsoft filters
o CJK support (CJK refers to Asian languages: C=Chinese, simple and traditional, J= Japanese, K= Korean)
These are all changes that were decided upon by Sun Microsystems before the source code was released to the community."
Or did you mean something else?
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
If you're thinking of buying StarOffice for the database, don't bother. Adabas sucks ass. OpenOffice can contact practically any database, including MySQL or Postgres. Personally I suggest the latter.
hi, Having had the priviledge of attending the OOo con in Hamburg (no, not Berlin as it read somewhere - maybe in Gnome news?), I would just make a little account of it. First, OOo is really a SUN effort in the "background". They do not like exterior commit in their CVS, because they branch off SO right from it - and they are _very_ cautious. Therefore many patches didn't make it in to the main branch. Neither did Ximian's version: they set up their own forked CVS "tinderbox". Ximian made a custom version - as seen on Michael's slides. Nice Gnome integration, little enhancements. Though not a Gtk port. It isn't free, unless SUN will pay them - or you buy XD2. Talks are in way (those who can - it might be nice to put a little pressure on them ;-).
To relax the community contrib problem, they plan using MWS and CWS-es as seen in one of the slides. Anyone can play in a child workspace, and if it prooves good, then it is merged back to the main workspace. The SO will be directly compiled from MWS, so there will be binary compatibility, and SO will be differenciated by adding a few extra files. They have a real hard time accepting community effort. Plans are there for a change - without a timeline though. So go and figure.
Ximian added much that was needed to "modernize" OOo. SUN plans the same stuff for 2.0. OOo 2.0 will have alpha-channel-ed icons, and that kind of stuff, much like Aqua. They don't plan to change toolkit though, SWING was slow and they decided on keeping their custom kit (they didn't like issues with windowmanagers to be solved with other tk-s...). Ximian would like to see a Gtk "port" in the future. They will change the l10n backend, and the help engine. Release will be in the end of 2004.
SDK: yes, real nice for the future. Look at two slides: one on Java, and one on Javascript. Both are nice. Note, that everything is java based: it is both good and bad. Good, because it is a real good tool (they demoed nice things using OOo Java and NetBeans), bad because the JAVA name means SUN (license, copyright etc. Look at the debian integration slide from Chris Halls for legal issues). A little quirk: anything done with SDK/Java will have a SWING GUI, which doesn't blend with OOo's. OOo can have multiple language bindings through bridges, but JAVA is preferred. StarBasic is depreciated.
UNO is a capable tool: Ximian is planning to adopt it and migrate from Bonobo - keeping the latter only for compatibility. KDE/Qt is not anywhere on the screen. So the formula of a distant future looks like (in my opinion):
Gnome/Gtk/OOo/Java/UNO/NetBeans.
MySQL guys were there, so they may have more serious plans. So they could be added too, but they didn't "show" anything.
http://marketing.openoffice.org/conference/schedul e.html
a member of the OOo Hungarian team ;-)