VBA Going Away, Macs Now, PCs Soon

Nom du Keyboard writes "As Microsoft drops support for older Office file formats, it looks like Visual Basic for Applications is also going soon. Mac Office 2008 has dropped VBA in favor of enhanced support for AppleScript, and Office 2009 is scheduled to lose it in favor of Mac incompatible Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) or Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). This sounds like the Mother of All Backwards and Cross-Platform Incompatibilities — especially since there appears to be no transition period where both the old and new scripting languages will be simultaneously supported. And as past experience with Visual Studio .NET has shown, upgrade tools are far less than perfect."

Comments

Unless....

[VValdo]

As Microsoft drops support for older Office file formats, it looks like Visual Basic for Applications is also going soon

Unless... what if there were only some alternative, open-source project that already supports it on Mac and a similar ongoing Windows/Linux project...

Oh well, I can dream.

W

Time for Java

[teknopurge]

Not a troll.

Java has a scripting extension. No, not Javascript(only), but you can plug various Scripting languages into it, or use Judo which is the real endgame for this problem.

Re:Cross Platform?

[ianare]

Python Power baby !!

Re:Cross Platform?

[ricegf]

"There is no macro language specified in ODF. Users and developers differ on whether inclusion of a standard scripting language would be desirable." So, I'm afraid not.

However, OOo defines a Universal Developer's Kit that allows development of scripts in any supported language. The one's we have written are in Basic, though our current choice would be Java or Python (we us a lot of both).

My current version of OOo (2.3 in Ubuntu Gutsy) lists Basic, Python, Javascript, and Beanshell as available by default. I'd have to check to verify that these same options are available on 2.3 on Windows and Unix.

Re:Cross Platform?

[mvdwege]

Does ODF have a scripting language defined?

Wrong question. ODF is a document format, it defines the form of the data. The data does not determine what tools must be used to process it, except in cases of proprietary formats, where the only tools are the vendor supplied ones. Tying the format closely to the tools meant to process it, to the point of embedding the processing code in the data, is one of the design blunders perpetuated by Microsoft, which gave us such wonderful 'innovations' as Word Macro Viruses.

ODF can in principle be processed by any language that has a decent XML processing library available, or through the API of the document editing tools. The leading API at the moment is OpenOffice.org's, which is open to any language with bindings to its UNO component model, including the language shipping with OpenOffice.org, a version of BASIC resembling VBA.

Mart