Re: Opendoc (was Re: spell checking)

[Phil Dawes <philipd parallax co uk>]

Martijn van Beers wrote:
> 
> > Dick> Similar thoughts here. Does anyone know if OpenDoc is still the
> > Dick> OMG standard for the Compound Document Format? I keep seeing
> > Dick> references to Javabeans, instead, now that OpenDoc seems to have
> > Dick> died off. I hope this doesnt mean having to embed a JVM!
> > I have no idea what is going on here.  But if a JVM is required then
> > they have completely failed in their job.  One of the whole points of
> > the thing is that CORBA doesn't tie to you a particular implementation
> > technology.
> AFAIK Opendoc was never a OMG standard. It was an Apple thing that has
> died. The Apple site (opendoc.apple.com) says you can 'obtain source code
> and porting rights from CI Labs through April 1997'
> 

I think it was (late 1996) as part of the distributed document common
facilities, but like you say, it's been dropped by everybody. The OMG
were rushed into the decision to adopt by IBM who, at the time were
pressuring everyone they could to get aboard the OpenDoc bandwagon
because OLE (as it was then) was taking off.


> I think it would be a good thing (tm) if Linux got something like OLE
> (i.e. Opendoc), no matter how opposed most of you are to the 'bloat' of
> CORBA, office suites and the like. If GNOME wants to be the user-friendly
> desktop system I hope it is going to be, we need to look at the users wishes,
> not just our own. And most users are used to, expect and demand a good office
> suite.
> 
> So, I hope someone a little higher in the GNOME hierarchy and with a little
> more CORBA knowledge will contact Apple to find out what the actual Opendoc
> status is at the moment.
> 
> cya,
> Martijn
> 

I did this a while ago. Apple have officially dropped OpenDoc for good.
IBM has released the source code for 'free' but not with a license that
we can live with.

I used to be a big OpenDoc proponent, but since trying it and speaking
to people who've programmed with it, I'm not so sure. The idea's are
fairly sound, but there's a lot of code there and I'm not sure people
can wait for a solution. 

I'm hoping that we can 'evolve' something which provides the same
concepts and functionality, but do it in very thin layers with complete
language independence. I've recently mailed Dave McCusker who's writing
irondoc - a structured storage implementation similar to OpenDoc's Bento
written in object oriented C. He said he's still working on the project
and this may be very helpful in the development of a gnome/KDE compound
document architecture.
(http://www.best.com/~mccusker/irondoc/irondoc.htm)

Cheers,

Phil.

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________
 Phil Dawes                               |   My opinions are my own
 WWW:    err.. temporarily non-existant   |   and nothing to do with
 Email:  philipd@parallax.co.uk           |      my employer.