Hello again, I wanted to follow up on this thought, and make it clear that what prompted the first email was not just this years OOocon. It is deeper then that and I wanted to give two more examples of what I mean.
In March of this year the Marketing group within OO.org created a new web site, http://why.openoffice.org/ to help promote the package. The site has a definite business orientation, well what would one expect for an Office Suite. If you look at the site it is very nice, a number of different markets are addressed and each module is given a few words and one screen shot to impart the feeling that the package is 'ready to go to work'. For example - Writer has a nice shot of a fairly full featured document. Calc a sheet with multiple ranges of data from what looks like a real business use and embedded graph. The same for Impress - a full blown presentation in the making. Base, well that is a different matter IMO. http://why.openoffice.org/images/base-big.png Look at this image used to impart it's readiness for business. A basic front screen with tables for a DVD collection and Recipes? How does anyone seriously expect that to engender thoughts of 'Enterprise ready'. That is still the image used to show off Base at the main website today by the way. Next - May of this year, the OpenOffice.org API Plugin is released. Outstanding, and created to the best of my knowledge by SUN engineers. At the time I had a look and was surprised that when creating an addon and selecting which modules a menu item should be displayed with one is not even offered the option of Base. It was as if they forgot the module was part of the package. Well, perhaps it had something to do with the quirkiness of the Base main window model. At the time there was an entry about this on the GULLFoss blog. I added a comment to that entry: "I would propose that you look into a project type for extending the embedded HSQLdb engine in Base. HSQL supports the creation of Triggers for table events ( Insert, Delete, Update ). It also supports creation of User Defined Functions ( UDF ) and stored procedures callable from within user created queries within Base. Triggers are realized by supplying a class that implements the org.hsqldb.Trigger interface. While UDFs are static Java functions. For Triggers connections back to the running database must also be managed, use of the OOo API for this would seem like a great combination. Just a little food for thought. It should at least be worth a quick conversation with someone in the Base project." What was the response to that comment - absolute silence. Not even so much as a 'Well, not a good idea to us.' Recently version 1.1 of the plugin was released. Is Base a recognized context for commands? NO! How is it that SUN engineers seem to not even know there is a Base module? Even if one chalks it up as simple oversight on the initial release, there is no excuse for missing it on the next release. Given the recent work done by the Base developers the context options are now even greater, the query designer window for instance. Hopefully someone will let the folks working on the plugin know that this work has taken place. Since I said there where only two more examples in this email I shan't mention the issue of VBA code in MS Access files, and the apparent belief that only Excel files come with these. Finally my question really should not have been phrased as "Where is Base", it should have been. Where is the Base evangelist within the organization? Where is the product management? The project management is active and engaged, hopefully they have someone in the next echelon as engaged as they are. Respectfully Drew --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
