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.""

Comments

Who is doing all this work?

[molo]

This is a large body of work. It must consist of several hundred man-hours of effort. Who deserves the thanks for this? Was it volunteer driven or is there corporate backing? Anyone have any details?

Thanks.
-molo

Re:Who is doing all this work?

[Jack William Bell]

Ximian is working on this? Hmm... I wonder how long it will be before we have a Mono (.NET) interface to the libraries?

StarOffice?

[kannibal_klown]

What does this mean for StarOffice? While I think OpenOffice is great, I use StarOffice mainly for the nicer looking fonts and stuff.

Can or will this SDK be usable for StarOffice, since they are very similar?

Smart idea

[gatesh8r]

It will make Open Office more attractive, especially for proprietary ("We hates proprietary! Hates it, hates it!") extensions. Seriously, both OSS licenced and proprietary/commerical modules will make for better file formats and more functionality. I have seen in my Sys Admin experience having to deal with M$ Office licenses solely for the reason of M$ Office API's integrated with the properietary software.

Go Open Office!

movies

[mz001b]

Hopefully this will allow someone with more time than me to make an extension that allows movies to be embedded in OOo Impress presentations. This is the one major thing missing from the suite that I really need (although, it is not a big enough issue for me to want to use Windows).

For now, pausing during a talk to fire up mplayer or the like works, but it is a bit inelegant.

Re:Hmmm

[pokryfka]

there's abiword bonobo object on the way
and more to come (including gtk-vi ;) )

so in a near future you should be able to edit messages as in abiword (or vi!) wich IMHO is great
not as feature rich as oo but lightweight and very usable

How about porting it kde now.

[Anonymous Coward]

How about using the sdk to port OpenOffice to kde. It's a lot better than koffice.

Fix the numeric pad first!

[deragon]

You know, marketing wise, they do not have their priorities right. They are pushing a spreadsheet for which the numeric pad is useless for a big chunk of the world, yet put out an SDK. I would put the efforts on the numeric pad issue first.

You do not believe me? Check out this bug report #1820

All people using the following locales are affected: Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, French (all except Switzerland), Galician, Italian, Portuguese (Portugal), Serbian (Latin) and Spanish (all variants). This list might not be complete.

Now try to convert someone using Excel to use Calc by telling them that they can not use the numeric pad anymore...

Re:Fix the numeric pad first!

[MrMr]

Convert them to use Linux and Calc then

xmodmap -e "keysym KP_Decimal = comma"

fixes OpenOffice, and all other programs

help is on the way.

[twitter]

Are you trying to Blame Sun for how people's Keyboards are wired? Hmmm, very strange. I'll quote the bug you pointed to so people don't have to go visit:

It is appliable to all versions of OO and StarOffice (at least 5.2 and 6.0 Beta).Introducing numbers with decimal point is too slow, because all Spanish keyboards sold in Spain (and the O.S. driver) has a dot in the numeric keypad, but the decimal point character in Spain is the comma. It means we have to use the numeric keypad and type the comma with the alphanumeric portion of the keyboard. Some spreadsheets like excel overrides the system default character for the dot of our numeric keypad outputting a comma, solving this problem for Spanish users. OO must do the same, because is very important for the productivity.
Thanks.

I've never had this problem but I've seen where it should be solved. This problem should be taken care of by proper configuration of X. There should be a version of the xkeyborad map for you. At a lower level you might even have your kernel configured for your particular keyboard. If you use an unreasonable comercial GUI that does not take care of such basic funcionality for you the SDK might come to your rescue and implement keymaping as a module or a whole European decimal system format if that's not already available. This bug seems inconcevable in a world where people use free software to type Arabic, Cryic, Hebrew and Vietnamese characters on a regular basis.

Good luck with your problem. I'd simply ten key with six digits. Ten key in Excell requires seven digits if you count frequent CNTRL-S hits.

Re:OpenBSD, anyone?

[JoeBuck]

Welcome to free software. If it doesn't work on a minority platform, it's up to people who care about that platform (e.g. folks like you) to contribute fixes, or at least to contribute help in isolating the bugs. Just because you're seeing problems on OpenBSD, by the way, doesn't mean it is "platform-specific" -- after all, it runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and MacOS X, plus many others.