Re: Specifying Office Component IDL?

["Dom Lachowicz" <cinamod hotmail com>]

Sam TH wrote:
> It would be very nice for AbiWord to be usable this way, and I'm sure
> that it would benifit people.  Unfortunately, AbiWord can't be built
> from the ground up with components, the way SO or Evolution are,
> because of the lack of XP component frameworks.  So, while we will
> probably be set up that AbiWord can be embedded in another
> application, or used as WordProcessor component (if there is one) we
> won't be usable as a text formatter, say, independetly of the rest of
> the application.  At least not until Windows ships with Bonobo.  :-)

This is not wholly true, Sam. What I think that we're missing on at least 
the Gnome side is a lack of "bonobo-ized" components/controls. For example, 
say I cook up some cool ass toolbar that gnumeric wants to use. Where might 
I put it? Well, what would probably happen now is that it would go into GAL 
and we'd both use it as a shared library. This is bad from a number of 
standpoints.

What do I think that we need done? I think that we need to start creating 
small gnome components. Maybe start with GAL widgets. AbiWord and Gnumeric 
and OO could use them (or more specialized components) through bonobo calls: 
bonobo_get_object("Gnome-Office Toolbar", "Bonobo/Control");

See an excellent write-up on bonobo and Monikers by Miguel and Mike Meeks 
here: http://primates.helixcode.com/~miguel/monikers.html

It's true that we would probably never be as component-based as Evolution in 
our architecture. However, if you look at the whole MVC architecture that 
the AbiSource guys initially wrote and we continue to work within, it does 
look and act a whole lot like COM.

Dom
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