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

A good step

[Anonymous Coward]

I think one of the strong reasons why we have Microsoft's dominance on Office programs is the add-on programs that take advantage of APIs provided in the office. So this is a good step, although I am very suspicious about how strong these APIs are compared to MS Office.

Re:A good step

[anonymous loser]

I agree, it is a good step, but there are still some *major* technical barriers that must be overcome before this will really be accepted as an alternative in business applications.

The main problem as I see it is that MS Office products support a COM automation API right out of the box. Now, I know a lot of folks may not think this is such a big deal, and the OpenOffice folks do provide a lot of similar functionality, but let me tell you why COM support is so important:

There are literally thousands upon thousands of business applications that already exist, written in VB and MS active scripting languages (VBScript, JScript, etc.) that depend on being able to access these other applications pretty much natively.

And, if the API isn't *exactly* the same, no company that depends on MS Office's API for business apps will be willing to spend that kind of development money just to make things the work same as they already do without OpenOffice.

The only chance I see (without OpenOffice implementing a perfect mirror of the MS Office API, and making it work natively with COM) is if somehow OpenOffice offered some amazing new functionality that a business couldn't possibly achieve using MS Office. Given MS's uncanny ability to steal good ideas and integrate them into their own products, that doesn't seem very likely to me.

Hmmm

[Gortbusters.org]

Can you do things like embedd Open Office into Evolution? That would be spiffy. I have Office XP at work and MS Word has hijacked the standard editting for e-mail messages in Outlook.

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

Light Reading Anyone?

[AtomicX]

"...This comprehensive guide provides, in 900 pages, a detailed description of the OpenOffice.org API concepts..."

Assuming they meant A4 pages, that = 561330 square CM of paper.

[Looks at bare bedroom wall, picks up brush]

Now... if you thought that your Tux wallpaper was geeky ... think again.

Maybe I should translate it into Yodish Soviet Russian Haxor first for added effect?

Hmm...

1¦\¦ 50\/137 Ru551/-\, 0p3¦\¦0ff1C3.0R6 /-\P1 R3/-\D5 Y0U!

Slightly Off-Topic

[caffeinex36]

I am sure evolution will jump on the bandwagon. With that said, I think it is safe to say that we need to start thinking about virus and worms.

Maybe cloning M$ isn't a good thing after all ;)


-Rob

flight sim..

[Suppafly]

So now that this is out, how long until someone makes a flight sim add-on for openoffice.

Re:flight sim..

[bankman]

Oh, there is, in OpenOffice calc. Check this article for easter eggs in OSS.

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?

[gimpimp]

Sun have engineers working on it, as do Ximian.
You can check out some of Ximian's work, here.

cheers,

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?

Great

[Fazed]

Now someone can code the paperclip assistant!

Re:Great

[BabyDave]

So many violent death animations, so little time ...

Re:Great

[bahwi]

Hell, we could just port vigor to it! (Screenshots)

And a FreeBSD Port Exists as well. So I'm sure you could apt-get it, rpm it, or emerge it also.

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:BZZT

[fucksl4shd0t]

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.

Oh, the glorious and perverse possibilities

[ColGraff]

Consider: Duke3d source code released.

Consider: Openoffice.Org SDK released within a week thereafter.

Question: How soon until Duke3d is ported to Openoffice.Org as a module?

easy

[hey]

What could be easier ?!

Re:BZZT

[Karpe]

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.

Re:Open Source Blows

[Spiritd0g]

May I suggest OpenOffice 1.1 beta with footnote support? Never hurts to peruse their feature list from time to time. Works just fine.

The APIs are pretty cool

[Krischi]

I've played around with an Alpha version of the SDK in October, and it was pretty nice. It is hard to get your head around some concepts, because the whole SDK is kind of baroque, just like OOo itself, but from my limited experience, it is very powerful.

I built a bridge for the Lua scripting language on top of the Java UNO bridge and used it to script 2D animations for a movie that I had to create for my research. I used OOo Draw to specify the animated elements, and traced out their paths via other elements and object prperties.

The scripts inspected the objects and their properties, animated them accordingly in an OOo Draw canvas, and saved the frames to the disk. All in all, it took me about a week to get this to work; time that I consider well-invested.

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

SDK?

[nmg196]

Does anyone else not quite get the point of an SDK for an opensource product?

The product *is* the SDK! :)

Nick...

You have won... the game of losing.

[Narchie Troll]

What exactly does getting "PAYED" mean? Is that anything like getting paid?

The state of education today...

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.

Boot time - more tests

[aoteoroa]

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.

Does anyone know if this API are the same in 1.1

[Robert The Coward]

I see from the site that 1.1 Beta is comming along and wondering if 1.1 was going to be basicly the same API or total different API.

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.

Re:How about porting it kde now.

[IamTheRealMike]

How about .... no.

OpenOffice is enormous. The code is mindboggling. It has its own portable runtime, its own object model, its own widget toolkit. It's like Mozilla.

You can't "port" it to KDE, any more than you could port it to GTK/GNOME. What Ximian have been doing lately is simply touching up the edges, making it use the same font/colors as GTK, use GNOME artwork etc, but it's not a "port".

[soapbox]The original KDE vision of producing an integrated desktop through making kickass APIs that everybody would use was a cute one, but ultimately short sighted - your average Linux desktop is a mishmash of different platforms and toolkits, KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice, Mozilla, Wine - there's no way all this sofware can be ported to KDE, so the only solution is to eliminate the idea of KDE/GNOME as a platform and become based entirely on standards, with KDE merely providing an implementation via C++ APIs.[/soapbox].

Re:Cut the Fat?

[stor]

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

Re:BZZT

[tzanger]

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.

OOo

[Anonymous Coward]

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 ;-)

Re: COM is supported

[Billly Gates]

Check 3.4 in Automation Brdige in the developers guide with the kit and then look at Service Manager Component. Com/Dcom is supported by UNO. aka Unified Network Object model in which c++, java, jscript, and basic all use.

The section on com/dcom is quite large and I am very impressed. I am simply amazed at how complex this product is. No wonder people complain its bloated good lord. Each section according to printer preview in IE is about 200 pages each! Its close to 2k pages in total.

Re:Why the name?

[thesman]

From the official FAQ [openoffice.org]:

10. How should I refer to OpenOffice.org in my documents?
[...]
Now for the obvious question: Why? The reason is: Someone else owns the phrase "OpenOffice", and we want to make sure we do not get into trouble.

Cheers.