Component wrapper for Abiword

[Justin Bradford <justin ukans edu>]

Abiword will eventually hit 1.0 (with, roughly, headers/footers and bugs
left), and I'd like to see embeddable components in 1.1.

However, Abiword is a cross-platform application, so it needs a
cross-component architecture. Thus, we need to make an oo component
interface which can describe Bonobo, OLE, and others. If, for instance,
everyone thinks it's possible to wrap OLE and Openparts with a Bonobo
interface, then that would work (after slight Abi-ification).

This little project would also have the interesting side-effect of
creating a potential common ground between KDE and GNOME component models
(assuming both Bonobo and Openparts back-ends were written).

So, anyway, I thought I'd solicit some ideas from people on this list.
Just as a first guess, I imagine Abiword needs the ability to:
-find a component capable of handling some specific data type
-feed the component data (from saved filed, paste, dropped object, etc)
-extract the component's data (to save the file [and possibly for
	copy/drag?])
-make component display data in a provided display window
-something for printing
-spawn an actual editor for the data (for when they double-click on it)
-and basic initialization/destruction stuff

What am I missing? I'm told this is really hard, but I don't see why, yet.

Also, and I realize this isn't the ideal list, but does anyone know of the
(or a) Bonobo equivalent on MacOS and BeOS?

Justin