Re: Proposals for OO and GO commonalities

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo linuxave net>]

Hi,

> > * 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.
> 
my first idea on this is to have a IDL:GNOME/Office/OfficeComponent (or whatever)
which will be used by a gnome-office-shell to load different office components.
Then, all people writing office apps make these apps implement this
interface, so that GNOME Office consists of a simple container which loads
these components. Thus, users can choose to use the OO presentation software
for presentations, but AbiWord for WP, GnomeDB for db-access, etc, etc

In "more detail", this would be:
module GNOME {
  module Office {
    interface OfficeComponent {
      .... /* methods for gnome-office-shell to interact with these coms */
    };
    interface WordProcessor : OfficeComponent { ... };
    interface Spreadsheet : OfficeComponent { ... };
    interface Database : OfficeComponent { ... };
    ...
  };
};

thus users just have to select the desired component for each task.

> > * 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'....
> 
well, I really meant file format filters. That is, it would be nice to have
all file formats (.doc, .tex, .ps, .gnumeric, etc) being handled in a common
place, so that any GO component can access them if needed. Maybe this could
use libgnomevfs?

> * 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.
> 
yes, I would also like to get input from people working on the office database
part, as I'm the maintainer of GNOME-DB, for sharing ideas and starting to
have all we talk in mind when continuing hacking.
AFAIK, only OO people, apart from GNOME-DB, are working on a
wannabe-database-gnome-office-component?

cheers