Features for Early Developer Release of the Office Scripting Framework (Version 0.1)

Framework

Supports the loading of different language Runtimes to allow the invocation of scripts written in a specific language. These scripts can be deployed within the OpenOffice.org installation (user or share area) or in a document. The current release provides a Java Runtime.

Note: IDE add-ins will only allow deployment of Java scripts to the user area of an Office installation or to a document.

Language Runtime

The Java Runtime will dynamically load a Java script and any supporting classes it requires, invoke the script and provide the script with access to the current OpenOffice.org document which it can manipulate using the Java UNO API.

IDE Add-ins

Integration modules for NetBeans and JEdit. The user can create a new Java script parcel which contains one or more Java classes. They can export any public methods from these classes as scripts, during deployment, as long as the method takes a Scripting Context as its first parameter. Using this Scripting Context object within these methods, they can access the current OpenOffice.org document and use the Java UNO API to manipulate it.

By installing the ODK for OpenOffice.org, the user has full access to online help and code completion within any scripts written in Java they are writing.

The IDE fully supports debugging Java applications and as a result it is possible to interactively debug your OpenOffice.org scripts written in Java. Just set a breakpoint, bind to the running JVM in OpenOffice.org, invoke the script in this OpenOffice.org and step through the code in the IDE. For more information on setting up OpenOffice.org to enable debugging see: Debugging Java components in NetBeans/Forte for Java

Binding

Ability to assign scripts written in Java to menu and key bindings from OpenOffice.org Tools/Assign Script menu (invokes a custom Assign dialog written in StarBasic)

Note: Bindings are stored in the application configuration settings from the Assign dialog . The cannot be stored directly in a document.

Security

Security in the Early Developer Release will be provided in the form of a nag dialog which will be popped up every time a user attempts to run a script from within a document. The nag dialog is not displayed when invoking application scripts deployed to the user or share area.

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Last Modified: Fri Nov 29 14:19:53 GMT 2002