This ignorance sometimes really makes me mad. It's interesting to see that the less people know the louder they shout.
Yes, I've seen some examples of that. Heh, there was once a guy telling me I must not know much about open source because I should be able to reuse the code from Thunderbird to make OOo have an email client. :-P
IMHO it is not hard to create OOo extensions and also their deployment is very easy. The deployment of OOo extensions is much better than in Firefox, our package manager even has a live deployment feature! Mozilla (not Firefox!) does not have such an extension/package manager at all.
In my experience, (1) coding the extension was easy, but (2) the documentatin was inpenetrable and (3) I couldn't figure out how to deploy them. There just wasn't a simple system for that.
I have high hopes that Ian Laurenson and Laurent will aleviate this. Ian is working on a wiki to help people learn the API, and both have talked about ways to simplify deployment.
But in any event, based on my experience, documentation and deployment are the biggest obstacles. It'd be wonderful if, for example, OOo had a dialog for extensions, like Thunderbird. It could download the extensions from some central server, like OOoMacros.
Developing OOo extensions is basically not more complicated than developing Firefox extensions,
But somehow, a lot more people write Firefox extensions than OOo extensions, and FF extensions are easier to install. So I guess the problems lie in the deployment end.
IMHO the GUI interface for of OOo is even easier to understand than the DOM/XUL stuff from Mozilla.
I found XUL much easier. I actually enjoyed writing a GUI with XUL.
I saw examples where professional developers created an OOo extension in one or two weeks of work.
I wrote some useful macros in about that time (readability analyzer, virtual keyboard) but couldn't manage to make them easy to install. So I dropped the projects.
An amateur might need more time, but I think it's not too much. The templates I mentioned will hopefully speed things up.
Templates would have helped me inmsensely. Could you donate those templates to Ian's Wiki? That would be a good step forward.
Will you have a template that includes an installer?
What are the chances of a near-future OOo version having an extension installer, like Thunderbird?
Cheers, Daniel.
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