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OpenOffice.org SDK Released 174

Posted by michael from the infinitely-extendable dept.
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.""
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OpenOffice.org SDK Released More

OpenOffice.org SDK Released

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  • What else needs to be said?
  • 'bout time.

    One small step for Linux community...a little bit bigger one for a decent Office Suite.

    -Rob

    • OOo (Score:2, Informative)

      by 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

  • A good step (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 05, 2003 @02:56PM (#5669416)
    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.

    • The APIs are pretty cool (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Krischi ( 61667 ) on Saturday April 05, 2003 @04:13PM (#5669705) Homepage
      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:A good step (Score:5, Insightful)

      by anonymous loser ( 58627 ) on Saturday April 05, 2003 @05:39PM (#5670230)
      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.

      • Managing Microsoft's upgrade & support cycle is like walking up the down escalator. Businesses are becoming resentful of lock-in.

        Microsoft might act to correct this, but people may have grown too distrustful of them in how they have treated standards and provided support in the past.

      • 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.

  • Are these basically Office macros for OpenOffice? Would think such a feature would be a priority.

  • Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Gortbusters.org ( 637314 ) on Saturday April 05, 2003 @02:59PM (#5669422) Homepage Journal
    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 (Score:2, Interesting)

      by pokryfka ( 654916 )
      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
      • Can you do things like embedd Open Office into Evolution? - there's abiword bonobo object on the way

        Binobo does not enabe functionality by itself for end-users. Instead, it give the way for programmers to implement it.

        Although, I wish bonobo will enable some sort of end-user choice: in Evolution you would see an automatically generated list of bonobo-enabled (and registered!) external editors. So if you would add to the system new bobono-enabled editor, it will automatically apperaed in such lists in a

    • Tools -> Options -> "Mail Format" tab -> Uncheck the first box:

      "Use Microsoft Word to edit e-mail messages"

      And have a nice day.

  • Light Reading Anyone? (Score:5, Funny)

    by AtomicX ( 616545 ) on Saturday April 05, 2003 @03:04PM (#5669437)
    "...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 (Score:4, Funny)

    by caffeinex36 ( 608768 ) on Saturday April 05, 2003 @03:06PM (#5669447)
    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.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Suppafly ( 179830 ) <(ten.ylfappus) (ta) (todhsals)> on Saturday April 05, 2003 @03:06PM (#5669448)
    So now that this is out, how long until someone makes a flight sim add-on for openoffice.

  • Who is doing all this work? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by molo ( 94384 ) on Saturday April 05, 2003 @03:07PM (#5669454) Journal
    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

  • Great (Score:5, Funny)

    by Fazed ( 21192 ) on Saturday April 05, 2003 @03:08PM (#5669456)
    Now someone can code the paperclip assistant!

  • BZZT (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You still forgot to copy MS Access, guys.

    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)?

    There are a ton of workstations all across the corporate world that are running MS Office just for Access.

    • Re:BZZT (Score:3, Informative)

      by fucksl4shd0t ( 630000 )

      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 fr

      • Re:BZZT (Score:3, Informative)

        by tzanger ( 1575 )
        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.
    • 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)?
      I'm guessing "seriously hard", otherwise you would have done it by now, right? Quit bitching and contribute, if you think it's so easy.

    • Re:BZZT (Score:5, Informative)

      by Karpe ( 1147 ) on Saturday April 05, 2003 @03:43PM (#5669570) Homepage
      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 [linuxworld.com] and here [linuxworld.com]. You can have an access lookalike with OO, ODBC and mysql.
      • Good point, now though it needs to be packaged "nicly" so more people find out about it and can easily use it.
      • Umm. It isn't hard at all. I've set up OOo and Star Office to use ODBC connections to mysql plenty of times. All you need to know is your server name, login and password.
      • OpenOffice also connects to firbird (Interbase) easily via JDBC. All you need is the jdbc driver, and the permission to access the database (ie filename, username, password) I assume the same is true for any JDBC or ODBC compliant database.

      • Re:BZZT (Score:2)

        by Micah ( 278 )
        I do it with PostgreSQL under Red Hat 8, and it isn't hard at all.

        The problem is, it really isn't the same thing as Access. Access is nice for small personal databases because you have the entire DB crammed into one nice little portable package. You can take the file and open it in anyone's Access, and it will work.

        Postgres certainly has a far more powerful DB engine than Access, but you don't have the file portability. It would be truly great if someone worked up a real Open Source equivalant to Acces
    • There are a ton of workstations all across the corporate world that are running MS Office just for Access.

      Is that an imperial long ton, i.e. 20 hundredweight (2,240 pounds) or a short ton (identical to the US ton at 2,000 pounds)? Or do you mean a metric tonne?

  • StarOffice? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kannibal_klown ( 531544 ) on Saturday April 05, 2003 @03:11PM (#5669467)
    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?
    • You do know that you can change the toolbar fonts, don't you?

      The first time I tried OO, I thought "Yuck" when I saw the default (just about the time when StarOffice was becoming non-free again, so I had the incentive to look) but you can select the TTF or T1 font of your choice through Tools-> Options -> Fonts -> Replacement Table.

      If you want to make any other fonts available to OO, there's the spadmin utility to link them. Unless you need the database stuff, I can't think of anything to make it

  • I hope this will help programming automated tasks of creating documents. MS-OFFICE has this for years, and this made it possible to the lowest scripting envrioment (read - VbScript/JScript) to get full control over the office suite.
  • Just what we needed. Now lets see if those 900 pages are worth the read. If they aren't they will probably make great filter paper for joints. ;)

  • Smart idea (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gatesh8r ( 182908 ) on Saturday April 05, 2003 @03:15PM (#5669487)
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mz001b ( 122709 ) on Saturday April 05, 2003 @03:23PM (#5669507)
    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.

  • I cannot get it to print, gs is my friend (sort of).
  • 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?

  • How about porting it kde now. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How about using the sdk to port OpenOffice to kde. It's a lot better than koffice.
    • I think that is a good idea, but is it possible? I have used OOo for the past three years with great success. Having it run as a 'proper' KDE app would be a good reason to move to Linux/FreeBSD.

    • Re:How about porting it kde now. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Saturday April 05, 2003 @07:52PM (#5670843)
      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].

      • any more than you could port it to GTK/GNOME

        This isn't strictly a Gnome or GTK port, but there is a Gnome2 icon theme available here [sourceforge.net] . The next best thing :-)

  • easy (Score:4, Funny)

    by hey ( 83763 ) on Saturday April 05, 2003 @03:35PM (#5669550) Journal
    What could be easier [openoffice.org] ?!
  • Open Office is a great suite to replace a word process, spreadsheet and a presentation tool. But replacing an Office suite means replacing all the tools. I need my Outlook. I wish this wicked office app had a similar-in-quality outlook clone that could interface with open source back-ends for ldap, mcal, imap, etc.

    Or maybe one exists? Anyone got a good pointer on a windows app (not a web-based system) that lets me calendar, email and share address books?

    • Here you go.I actually like evolution better than I ever liked Outlook.

      On that note, let me say specifically, that I want my Office suite to
      • NOT

      include anything for e-mail. First of all, an e-mail client is not a publishing tool. Its used to converse.

      Secondly, I don't want something made for publishing with a built in api to require access to the internet for any purpose. That leads to the insecurity, which leads to the dark side - viruses.

      Better to keep the two separate.

    • Please god, not a "similar in quality" outlook clone. I have had the misfortune to use that pile of crap for the past week, and quality is not a word that springs to my mind.

      As a quick example, notice how the list view in which your email messages are displayed has a scrollbar that doesn't conform with any other scrollbar used in any other microsoft package.

      Or the fact that it is incapable of reading your open standards news groups like every other email/news client under the sun - including it's "lite" v

    • Ximian Evolution (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      www.ximian.com

  • Fix the numeric pad first! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by deragon ( 112986 ) on Saturday April 05, 2003 @04:45PM (#5669906) Homepage Journal
    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 [openoffice.org]

    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...

    • Convert them to use Linux and Calc then

      xmodmap -e "keysym KP_Decimal = comma"

      fixes OpenOffice, and all other programs
      • Ah yes... and then any application written by an americain that ignores the locale while barf at the comma returned by the numeric pad. So now Calc will work, but some other apps will not.

        Unfortunatly, since many apps under linux ignore locales, this is not a good solution. The better one would be an item in the preference to setup the function of the KP_Decimal within Calc.

        In a perfect world, the OS should take care of this. But the world is not perfect, and we need a solution now.

    • help is on the way. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by twitter ( 104583 ) on Saturday April 05, 2003 @05:27PM (#5670170) Homepage Journal
      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.

  • SDK? (Score:4, Funny)

    by nmg196 ( 184961 ) on Saturday April 05, 2003 @05:20PM (#5670131)
    Does anyone else not quite get the point of an SDK for an opensource product?

    The product *is* the SDK! :)

    Nick...
    • Take a look at the developers guide. Good lord is it bloated with thousands of pages worth of calls, functions, and classes as well as tutorials. WIthout the sdk there is no way anyone could make sense of the code.

  • .... Pizza....

    Oh, not that UNO's. Sorry.

    Mmmmmm.... OpenOffice....

  • Does anyone know if this API are the same in 1.1 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Robert The Coward ( 21406 ) on Saturday April 05, 2003 @06:08PM (#5670359)
    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.
  • RANT:
    Amazing, isn't it? All this great stuff happening for OpenOffice, and yet they still haven't spent 10 minutes to solve the problems it's having on OpenBSD.

    I don't know about anyone else, but I'm damn tired of cludgy, platform-specific, Open Source software. First Mozilla, now OpenOffice. Where does it stop? Linux isn't the only Unix platform in the world, yet it's the only platform most software will compile on, without a truckload of developers spending hours on each release to port it over to a

    • Re:OpenBSD, anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by JoeBuck ( 7947 )

      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.

      • 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.

        It certainly does. OpenBSD doesn't do anything strange. It's just that the programmers basically did the job of porting it to the platforms that they wanted it to work on, and maintained those ports. It can't be compiled on any other form of Unix that they didn't expressly port it to. It has to be ported to compile on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, S

        • scripsit evilviper:

          It has to be ported to compile on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, SCO, Tru64, ANYTHING other than what they ported it to.

          More than that, it apparently requires very significant work to compile on non-i386 arches. AFAIK it won't build on sparc, alpha, m68k, s390, mips, ia64, or any other Linux arches except powerpc. IANA OO.o developer, but it seems that portability was not a concern from the beginning -- and now it's making porting more difficult.

          I wonder if this is a legacy of its Wind

          • That's a bit strange, however. I would have expected it to work with, at least SPARC, since Solaris is the primary platform.

            but it seems that portability was not a concern from the beginning

            Well, I've got nearly a half-dozen /.ers (replying to my post) that strongly disagree. :-)

            I wonder if this is a legacy of its Windows origins?

            That's a good point, but Sun has had plenty of time to change it already. Maybe it's time to rip out the guts of OO, and build a new office suite around it. That would pro

          • I wonder if this is a legacy of its Windows origins?

            I think it's a legacy of its C++ origins - applications like this should be moving to Java.

            Anyone know when Microsoft will have moved Office to Dotnet (CLR)? Certainly when this happens they'll gain a lot of agility insofar as supporting different hardware platforms is concerned.
            • I think it's a legacy of its C++ origins - applications like this should be moving to Java.

              A) There's no reason a C++ application can't be portable.
              B) There's plenty of examples of java programs being platform-specific.
              C) Most people are not fans of Java. If OpenOffcie was java, you'd not see a fraction of the people using it.

              (Sun has it right, very few Solaris apps are java-based... java is almost exclusively used for server services.)
              • a) I'm not quite sure what your perspective is, but it is not that of a typical technology consumer. Such people are not going to compile C++ applications.

                b) There are plenty of examples of non-platform specific Java apps - across phones, PDAs and mainframes. Nothing else comes close in achieving portability.

                c) I'm not sure how you gauge this, anyway, appeals to vague sentiment are of little value in such a debate. I trust you will be making Microsoft aware of your findings so that they can halt their eff
                • a) Who said end-users need to compile the application? Just because the code should be written portably, does not exclude distributing binaries.

                  b) Actually, C is the single most portable lanuage available. Java's claim to fame is sandboxing. Java is basically Sun's own version of perl.

                  c) Performance, stability, responsiveness, and a relatively small memory footprint are things people want in the applications they use regularly. And I don't see what C# has to do with any of this at all.
        • "That is the VERY DEFINITION of NON-PORTABLE!"

          No. The definition of non portable is that it can not be ported without a complete rewrite of the code. It may be hard to port but it's portable.

    • Mozilla? (Score:2)

      by SEE ( 7681 )
      Look, when a package compiles and runs on nineteen different operating systems as varied as AIX, BeOS, BSD/OS, DG/UX, FreeBSD, HPUX, Irix, Linux, MacOS, MacOS X, NetBSD, OpenUNIX/Unixware, OpenVMS, OS/2, QNX, Solaris, Tru64, and Win9x, and WinNT, the problem on the 20th probably isn't Mozilla being non-portable; it's that the 20th operating system is doing something unusual.
      • Normally that would make sense, but knowing Mozilla and OpenBSD, I can tell you that it's not the case. What that actually means is that someone went through a good deal of effort to port the application over to the individual systems. Go back into the history of Mozilla and you will see less and less platforms working with Mozilla as you go further back.

        In defense of Mozilla (versuses OpenOffice) the developers were good enough to import the necessary patches, and attempt to maintain compatibility after
  • Can someone explain why it's called OpenOffice.org rather than just plain OpenOffice? It seems a bit peculiar to me, I mean, you'd then expect the domain name to be openoffice.org.org.

    Is it going to be another project like GTK+ where there's an 'official' name with some random suffix, used by almost nobody except the project web page?

    • Re:Why the name? (Score:2, Informative)

      by thesman ( 655727 )
      From the official FAQ [openoffice.org] [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.

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