Chris Monahan schrieb: > Hi, avid OpenOffice user here, for over a year now > First time I've mailed to here, I don't know if I should sign up to > something or other... > Anyway, here's a magnaminous suggestion, OpenOffice provides a whole > bunch of stuff in a programmatic sense, by stuff meaning, widget > systems, filters, dialogues, configurations and much more stuff going > on underneath the hood. > > + it is a fundamentally modular application on at least a superficial > level, with 5 modules, writer, calc, impress, draw, base, math. Yeah, > make sense. > > So, what about the ability to add more or custom modules to that list? > Using some published mechanism/API. They could take advantage of all > that 'stuff' from the programmatical (is there such a word? =S) list > of features, so for example if it dealt with vector graphics then it > could use all the filters from Draw.
There already *is* such a framework. If you start OOo from the command line without any parameters you will see the GUI part of it. The OOo framework allows to plug in new modules and in fact that's what we did in OOo2.0 with Base. Theoretically you could add more modules to OOo and embed it into our framework. But even without at framework that takes care for a lot of things it's still a huge work to add a useful module. If anybody wanted to add any modules we would be glad to help. We for ourselves don't have plans to add something at the moment. How the framework basically works is documented and explained in our Developer's Guide. > The logical extension of this optionality is: > > a: that the existing modules would also be optional, thus allowing us > to finally deal with the "but it installs everything when I don't want > it to" issue when evangelising, and opening up the possibility of > lightweight openoffice, or even OpenOffice with alternative modules > (eg a port of AbiWord as an OpenOffice module, probably insane and > pointless, but an example) That's already possible. But just because we have this framework thing removing one or two modules from OOo is not a big win for the disk size of it: most of the code is shared between the modules. > Of course a 'module' so to speak wouldn't neccesarily be a full > fledged counterpart of the current modules, such as writer, they could > work in the background. So in some ways I'm asking about a vast > extension to the plugin architecture. Ideally so that isn't so much a > plugin architecture, more as a Generic Framework in which the > components are equal. Please don't use the name "plugin" here, it's too easily misunderstood. We are talking about Add-Ons (I assume that's what you named "plugin") and Add-Ons are only one special kind of OOo extensions. Many OOo extensions are arbitrary UNO components that either replace an existing OOo component or add new services to OOo that can be used by the existing OOo modules and components. OOo is extendable by design and many of its built-in parts can be replaced by other components implementing the same API. Theoretically you could rewrite the Writer or Calc part without changing any line of code in the other parts of OOo. No vast extension necessary. :-) Ciao, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS Please don't reply to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". I use it for the OOo lists and only rarely read other mails sent to it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
