On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 5:25 PM, Michał Jaskurzyński <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > My name is Michal Jaskurzynski. I am computer science student at West > Pomeranian University of Technology. I am interested in participating > in project: "ODF Command Line Tools" submitted to Google Summer of > Code program. > I made draft application > https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-SCbjaNS-Wl1J7eNen9Lj1y69QWAZsJOjf8b6Ho1W4o/edit?pli=1. > Could you give me your opinion about my proposition? >
Hi Michal, Thanks for sharing the draft of your proposal. One observation: you have a -s parameter that contains a mini script of commands. Could this be a in a separate file as well, which could make it easier to do more complex scenarios? We could even have a special "small language" for text processing of WYSIWYG documents. The interesting thing about that approach is that the same syntax could be implemented on multiple languages, e.g., ODF Toolkit for a GSoC project, but then someone else could implement on top of Apache POI to support MS Office documents. So it will be good to have a clean abstraction and separation between the command layers and the ODF-manipulation layers. I think the Simple API that we have today is a good level of abstraction for many text operations, but it requires a skilled Java programmer to work with it. They don't need to understand ODF in detail, but they do need to understand Java. The idea of command line approach is to allow system admins and power users to do automated document processing, to make powerful tools available to them. One way we could start this project would be to develop some scenarios for how users would want to operate on documents. I think, in the end, this project will be equally a design effort (even a command line tool as a "user interface") and a coding task. -Rob > WBR > Michal Jaskurzynski
