Proposals for OO and GO commonalities

[Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com>]

On Fri, Nov 17, 2000 at 06:32:16AM -0100, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> 
> So, again, shall we start talking about common stuff so that we all go in the
> same direction? For example:
> * common UI look&feel: a good place for placing widgets and other UI related
>   stuff could be libgal, if not a new libgnomeoffice
GAL is definitely appropriate for the GO components.  This is what
it was intended for.  It not likely to offer much to the OO codebase.

> * CORBA: we should also start to talk about common higher-level office
>   components, to be implemented by all the different GO components.
Agreed.  This would be an excellent starting point.

> * common file formats: filters for file formats should be also implemented
>   in a common place, so that all GO components can make use of them, to
>   allow REAL compatibility between them.
Depends on what you mean by 'file format'.  It has been my
experience that the file format for an application closely mirrors
its internal data structures and implementation philosophies.
Even if everyone uses xml, having two similar applications using
the same file format seems very unlikely.  I'd recommend starting
with something 'simpler'.  There has been alot of discussion on how
to handle structured files for OO.  This is definitely an area that
Gnumeric is ripe to explore.  We need a way to save embedded objects
and images.  How does Abi handle this ?

* utility libraries
There are several elements that should be shared across several of
the office components.  The first that leaps is value formating and
parsing.  OO has a framework (svtools/source/numbers), and gnumeric
has some work on it (gnumeric/src/{number-match,format,formats}).
OO's is more mature.  However, the code would be difficult to access
in GO due to the intimate relationship with various C++ string
libraries and a completely different approach to translation.

Thats probably enough for now.
    Jody