Re: [dev] GNOME Office and OpenOffice

[Michael Hoennig "(mi)" <mi sun com>]

>  What OpenOffice could do is (1) to provide well separated components
> which could easily (?) be brought into the GNOME Office later. (2) To
> build a first class virtual components environment. I.e. to provide a
> build environment where components could be built for Bonobo, KDE-parts,
> MS COM or whatever.

This is an extremely good idea! Do AbiWord and Gnumeric already have 
external APIs specified? If not, the better it is: OpenOffice does! There 
are modules which easily can be used by both - actually internally in 
OpenOffice there are already two edit engines: a simple one which is used 
within drawing objects and spreadsheet cells for example, and the 
advanced one which is used for the wordprocessor itself. And there is a 
single implementation for the XML writer/reader!

If applications were supporting the OpenOffice API, they would get 
OpenOffice XML import/export almost for free. We just had to take care 
what we do with things which do not exist in the other applications. On 
the other hand, OpenOffice needs a linguistic module and printing. At 
least the first one is integrated using the external API, though the 
printing stuff is integrated by a VCL (OpenOffice's graphic device 
layer).

Probably even, one day, we can share dialogs or certain kinds of document 
contents, like text tables or text frames (which are both much deeper 
integrated than todays Bonobo controls or embeddable components).

BTW: We are thinking about an OpenOffice API / Bonobo merger. To be more 
exact: We are thinking about how that could be done. Though this is not a 
promise for anything.

> In my view an office suite should be much like any distribution. Debian
> has its distribution of selected Linux stuff, Helix has its distribution
> of selected GNOME stuff, and GNOME Office should have its distribution of
> selected office components.

This would become a realistic possiblility, if we went this path...

	Michael