Chris Monahan wrote:
In the case of integrating a Mozilla and an OpenOffice application
what would that mean for the respective underlying frameworks (NSPR
and UNO)
That depends on the depth of integration. IMHO we should start with
integrating TB functions into the OOo menus and perhaps vice versa,
using the extension technologies of both applications. This will not
require any merging of the used GUI technologies on an implementation
level, of course we will need an inter process communication to allow
the execution of OOo-functionality in TB and vice versa.
I mean will they begin to merge, or form an extensive bridge between?
or is it possible to ignore the underlying frameworks and just mash up
some bindings? (and what would be the best thing for it?)
Daniel Boelzle, one of our PIM developers, has created a UNO-XPCOM
bridge that already works pretty well. By instantiating a component into
the TB process that uses this bridge to bootstrap a UNO proxy inside TB
we basically have a platform independent, remote capable communication
between the applications and we could start to reuse one of them in the
other one. This way you could theoretically have TB and OOo on different
machines and still have them talking to each other. XPCOM only works
in-process but UNO and and XPCOM bridge bring the power in.
Consider, if openoffice and thunderbird were to be integrated, what
about widgeting? Would OpenOffice be able to use Mozilla widgets, or
should it be the otherway round, or both?
We did some experiments with XUL in OOo already; the effort to convert
the whole OOo GUI would be very high though it won't be impossible.
That's one reason why I think that we should start with writing
extensions and use inter process communication instead of trying to go
for a GUI merge immediately. It could take years to deliver something
useful with the GUI merge approach. I assume it's better to have
something in a not too far future.
Consider, would we be able to open Thunderbird from openoffice?
Thats already possible today, e.g. by a Basic macro.
or edit mail in openoffice from thunderbird?
I know that people ask for that. Basically it's not impossible though it
won't work without doing work in both apps.
You could fire up OOo Writer from TB, write some text there and then
call "send mail" from inside OOo. Currently that works only with the
document as attachment but I think it would be doable to use the
document content as mail body also if you can control the information
flow between TB and Writer. Nevertheless the look and feel would be much
less integrated as with the current mail editor I'm currently using to
write this mail.
Why are people asking for this? I think because they want to operate
their mail editor in the same way as their word processor. First step to
achieved that could be adapting keyboard shortcuts, sharing dictionaries
etc.
A real integration would need to customize Writer a lot (exchange menus
and toolbars when used as mail editor etc.). That's feasible but it
would take some time.
I ask partly since this thread is referring to MS Office 2007 outlook,
and that has extensive integration, so in one sense the question is,
how /integrated/ is 'integrated'?
Or: how much integration do we need to give the impression of "integration".
Ciao,
Mathias
