Re: GNOME Office list, and Sun/AbiWord

[Martin Sevior <msevior mccubbin ph unimelb edu au>]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, Torsten Schulz wrote:
>  
> 
> 	StarOffice founds on a system abstraction layer, which is not based on 
> 3-rd party products but totally developed in house. It does consist of 
> several libraries encapsulating ui toolkits, file system, networking, 
> threading... It is not in the Swing tradition because it was developed 
> before SUN has had their hands on it. 
> 
> 	We are thinking about moving to GTK, but one important requirement will 
> be a very good Windows port of GTK. Please keep in mind, that windows is 
> one of the main plattforms of StarOffice/OpenOffice and this will last 
> for more than the next year.

Have you thought of, or can you sub-class your GUI/event handling/file
system/networking to different target platforms? This is the approach Abi
has taken and is the reason for its toolkit independence. This has the
added benefit that each platform is a native application with native
widgets, native look and feel and best possible speed. In an open source
environment this works really well because you get developers interested
in their own platforms doing a lot of the "localization" work. Abi has
native ports to BeOS and QNX already. MacOS is in the works. A side
benefit is good code because sloppy stuff gets picked up on different
compilers.

Cheers

Martin