Re: How do we want the different parts to integrate (Was Re: What goes in gnome office? (Lets keep it simple))

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

On Tue, 16 Apr 2002, Mikael Hallendal wrote:

> tis 2002-04-16 klockan 22.36 skrev Adrian Custer:
> > Hey all,
> 
> Hi!
> 
> Thanks, I can only say I agree with you. I had been thinking of sending
> a mail to start a discussion about what kind of integration we want
> between the applications. 
> 
> For example MS Office have VERY much integration, probably much more
> than you need. But we need to get a list of things that you want to do
> be able to do between the apps (like your example of sending a project
> as an attachment in a mail). That is exactly what we are using Evolution
> for in MrProject 0.5.X (not in the GNOME 2 branch since evolution isn't
> ported yet).
> 
> I can only speak for MrProject but here are some first ideas how we
> would like to be able to integrate with the other applications that's
> been discussed:
> 
> Abiword:
> --------
> 
> We would like to be able to write a document in Abiword and insert
> graphs, data about tasks/resources, cost calculations and such from the
> MrProject data in the document and have it be updated.
> 
> Either by having an Abiword component in MrProject or by running Abiword
> beside and have it fetch data through Mrproject.
> 

The latter will be up and running much faster than the former though great
progres has been made on both.

It is already possible to have abiword running invisibally as background
process and to feed data through to it via stdio. The command-line plugin
allows this. Sometime soon I'll put a GtkObject wrapper around it to allow
CORBA communication via bonobo.

I now have a working abiword Bonobo-control which allows abiword to be
inserted into any bonobo-aware application. The control can be accesed via
the bonobo_arg system or by the using clicking the document and editting
it.

I've played with a bit and I must say that it's performance is excellent.
It handles expose events, scrolling, typing editting as fast as native
abiword within my limited testing on my fast laptop. I must say that
bonobo appears to be a fast component system. Creating new abiword
controls from an already running instance of abiword is almost instaneous.
(There is no measuable delay between pressing return and seeing a new
test-container with an abiword doc in it). I haven't done anything like
enough stress testing to see if the race conditions that have plauged
other bonobo based apps will show here.



This code sits on my laptop awaiting the abiword 1.0 release (which
should be Real Soon Now). It should be usable immediately for both
evolution and nautilus to allow emdedded or inline views of various Word
Processing formats.

It's extremely easy to use and communicate with via bonobo_args.
I now have to learn a bit about IDL and Gnome name spacing rules to make
up a correct IDL file.

I'm very happy that people would like to use abiword in their applications
and I would like to help them make that possible.

I haven't yet investigated what it would take to make abiword documents
truely embeddable in other apps no to make abiword accept embeddable apps
(apart from thinking about document format issues.)

> Gnumeric: 
> ---------
> 
> We'd like to be able to use the math engine in Gnumeric for stuff in
> MrProject. I think you can find a lot of good uses for this.
> 
> Be able to use data from Gnumeric in MrProject and the other way around.
> So that you for example have your resources in MrProject and get them
> displayed in cells in Evolution.
> 
> I think you can find lots of good ways to interact between MrProject and
> Gnumeric.
> 


I would really like to use either Gnumeric/GDA as a data source for
envolope printing and mail merge within abiword. My wife's microbusiness
could use this almost immediately. 

Maybe we should think of constructing an Gnome-Office shell much like MS
Works to allow users to simply construct such things?

I don't have a particular need to insert spreadsheets in my Word
processing applications but people keep saying this is a cool and useful
so it would be nice to be able to do it eventually.

> Evolution:
> ----------
> 
> In MrProject 0.5.X we support to write an email to a certain resource,
> to all resources in a group of resources, to the project leader of a
> project. 
> 

As noted elsewhere it makes perfect sense to extract addressbook
information from evolution and make it available to AbiWord.

> We would also like to be able to integrate with the calendar in some way
> so that you can export data from MrProject into an Evolution calendar.
> (We would also like to use the Evolution calendar in MrProject
> preferably as a stand-alone widget).
> 
> Import resources from a the address-component of Evolution.
> 
> Set TODO's in Evolution regarding tasks in MrProject ...
> 
> Well, this is just a try to get the discussion started on how we really
> want the different parts to integrate. If we know that it's much easier
> to start figuring what's the shortest path to get it.
> 

One very important application that I would love to get working is
GtkMathView for the creation and display of maths formulae. Luca is now
making substantial progress on this.

Can someone present a high level view on how we should define a common
set of communication protocols to allow data sharing? Do the OAF IDL files
already provide the information we need?


Cheers

Martin