Hi bibliographers Zitat von Oliver Specht: > "From my point of view the new bibliographic component should handle > everything related to the bibliographic data, styles and formatting of > the output itself.
In general, it is a good idea, to keep OOoBib and Writer separate in the sense that Writer doesn't know anything about OOoBib at all. But then, how to "integrate" OOoBib UI functionalitiy in Writer? There is actually a very nice conceptual answer to this: Extension points and plugins. Here is the background: The previous weeks I did some mayor advances in Java, by discovering and understanding the Eclipse IDE, another Java IDE beside Netbeans, that can be used to create applications on an application framework and to program plugins for the IDE itself. (The IDE that can, among others, be used to enhance the IDE itself, so to speak.) The point I want to make here is, that this Eclipse platform and IDE are a just perfect examples of a flexible and extensible open source programs - something I would like to see in OpenOffice as well. To give some examples: Plugins can not only contribute actions (e.g. toolbar icons and menu entries) to an ecisting application, the can also add editors (e.g. for certain file types), property pages (e.g. for certain file types), one or more preferences pages (that store general user settings for this plugin), views (such as customized navigators, "sidebars"), wizards, help contents and so on. Also, plugins can provide interface-based extension points themselves to allow other plugins to extend them in turn. AND: Given that the plugin developer cares a bit about a consistent design (concerning the icon design) You will never know which functionality stems from which plugin. (Well, actually the whole IDE consists ONLY of plugins, the "basic application" is merely a plugin loader.) One could say, that I'm really fond of this concept. If OpenOffice provided were to provide such source code extensibility to the public world it would be possible to: - create a bibliography plugin (or a series of them) that - fits neatly into the Writer user interface, when activated, - adds an additional "bibliography" tab functionality to the "Format->Page" dialog - adds an additional "Format->Document" dialog for bibliographic document-wide settings, e.g. what shyle guide to use - adds general bibliographic settings to the "Tools->Options" dialog - allow to use an "autoupdate function" to download our OOoBib plugin from the internet and to update it if a new version is available. - provide extension points ourselves, so other developers could add f.e. import/export filters for the BibDB or new internet database searching functionalities. And most of all: Given that useful extension points existed, It would be possible, to start programming OOoBib without even touching the Writer source code. And if changes in the other plugins were really necessary: the Eclipse framework is rather simple to use, compared to the monolithic (from what I've heard) OpenOffice source code and its UNO bridges. (OK, maybe this is subjective, since I understand Java, but not C.) Eclipse is of course platform independent and, as a nice side effect of Java, does not even need an "installation", only some unpacking. And for those concerned: AFAIK Eclipse is not based on Sun Java, but works with any Java implementation although most will run it on Sun Java, of course. Anyway, THAT's what I call modern open source programming. I encourage you (and Martha in particular) to have a look at Eclipse and its documentation. There's so much that we and the OpenOffice project could learn from it's application concepts. See: - Eclipse: www.eclipse.org - Exlipse technical articles: Explain everything, but require basic knowledge: http://www.eclipse.org/articles/index.html - Latest download: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/S-3.1M6-200504011645/index.php - Plugin developer guide "org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv.3.1M6.pdf.zip" on the above page - Nice introductory tutorial article: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-ecplug/ Matthias Basler [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------- This mail was sent through http://webmail.uni-jena.de --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
