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.

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

[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.

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.

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...

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.

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: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].