Document Management System using OpenOffice.org
(BOF)
Marten Feldtmann
This session shows the result of the support of
OpenOffice and StarOffice within a Document Management
System called "DokWorks", which has been developed
over the last five years.
In this session we talk about problems, when using
OpenOffice.org / StarOffice in a product - related
to development or customer view.
We will show the result and how it has been done.
Biography:
Marten is former developer of the (out of business)
company Phoenix EDV Systemtechnik, which developed
the DMS system I mentioned above. I've done software
development over the last 15 years in different
categories using different languages.
Claus Sørensen, Sophie Gautier, Simon Brouwer
Leaders of Native Language Projects
Every native language project (NLP) have some
experience and knowledge about running their NLP which
the other NLP leaders and contributors can benefit
from.
How to motivate contributors, keep the "stakeholders"
informed, attracting new contributors, arrange
contributor events, inform the contributors of
progress, manage missing response from
contributors.
Biography: Claus Sørensen is one of
the main actors of the Free and Open Source Software
community in Denmark where his is a boardmember of the
Danish Unix User Group, the leader of the Danish native
language OpenOffice.org project and also active within
the OpenOffice.org marketing project.
A Proper P2P Implementation
for OpenOffice.org (BOF)
Sam Hiser Co-Lead of the OpenOffice.org
Marketing Project
We will survey the arena of Peer-to-Peer technologies
and narrow the focus onto a few good P2P platforms that
could be deployed to reduce bandwidth costs and
increase scalability of distribution for the existing
OOo system of servers and mirrors.
The recommendations will have important implications
for the way the Ooo Community may be able to adapt
its software publishing infrastructure to handle
dramatic annual load spikes (associated with major releases)
while reducing the cost burden shared by Sun,
CollabNet and cooperating mirrors all across the global system.
I will give a session on legal validity of Open Source
licenses in Germany and Europe. We have in German legal
reviews a rich debate on these questions.
Our position is, that most clauses of the GPL and
other Licenses are perfectly valid, while some clauses
are not. But there are other opinions saying that the
whole system of Open Source Licenses does not work
in European Law.
Towards more Interactive Presentations with OpenOffice.org
(BOF)
Michael Reinsch, Cora Burger University of Stuttgart
An approach is presented which is currently implemented in
the NUSS (Notebook University Stuttgart) project.
Based on users carrying mobile devices and on
wireless networks, it aims at a more interactive,
collaborative way of presentations using OpenOffice.org.
Especially when regarding the area of teaching, such
increased interactivity is really indispensable
as demonstrated by the following scenarios.
By distributing the presentation digitally to all
participants, the page currently discussed is shown
on everyone's notebook. Hence, each participant can
add individual notes for later usage without any
media discontinuity. For a more vivid presentation,
the speaker can apply changes to slides
during the talk (e.g. highlight or add something).
After proper permission by the speaker, participants
can append annotations being available to the public.
Participants can send questions and remarks to the
speaker without the need to interrupt the talk.
The required functionality is achieved by
writing a suitable wrapper component in
Java which profits from the OpenOffice.org API.
To prevent from chaotic access by all participants,
an existing infrastructure for role management and
permissions is included. It allows different
mechanisms and policies, e.g. a simple turn taking
procedure under control of the speaker.
As a whole, the presentation component of OpenOffice.org
is enhanced by a collaborative mode.
Biography:
Michael Reinsch is currently studying Software Engineering
at the University of Stuttgart. Cora Burger has a diploma
in Mathematics from the University of Stuttgart and a PhD
in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe.
She is research assistant and lecturer at the Department
Distributed Systems of the Institute for Parallel
and Distributed Systems at the University of Stuttgart.
Struggling with a C++-based component architecture (BOF)
Stephan Bergmann
Star Office Entwicklungs GmbH
Historically, the code base that later became OOo
was a large, rather monolithic C++ application.
Then, some base layer of functionality was factored out,
mainly to serve as a foundation for UNO-oriented processes
(processes that host components which interact with other,
distributed components within the UNO framework).
For mostly technical reasons, that meant using C instead
of C++ in some parts (mainly for APIs), and left us with
a code base that is a mixture of C and C++. This state of
affairs lead to a continuous stream of problems and frustrations
when using or extending these base layers,
and this talk will describe some of them, and explain how
they can be solved.
First, I will give brief introductions to both the
architecture of the OOo base layer under discussion
(better known as the "UDK"), and the reasons why C++
is often a better language than C when implementing or
interfacing to some software component. Then, I will
discuss some of the issues where the goals of the
UDK collide with the use of C++, and what can be done about it:
Creating APIs that are robust against failure.
Supporting process-global concepts like memory management.
Using exception handling.
Issuing improved versions of components while supporting
a backwards-compatible, stable API.
Building components that have minimal requirements
on their hosting environment.
Letting foreign components built with arbitrary
C++ compilers use the UDK.
Keeping the source code as platform-neutral as possible.
Biography:
Stephan works for Sun for well over five years now,
developing software mainly in the base-libraries area
of OpenOffice.org/StarOffice.
Driven by a desire to build well-crafted software.
The talk will present some concrete ideas and concepts
for a new toolkit/canvas framework, to be used by
the OpenOffice.org applications. The limitations of
the current VCL-based approach will be outlined, and
a migration path is sketched on how to gradually
move OpenOffice.org towards using a native,
platform-integrated and compelling UI.
Introduction
Status Quo
Other solutions
Problems
System integration
Accessibility
Look&Feel
Possible solutions
Migration paths
Roadmap, outlook
Biography:
After studying computer science at the University of Hamburg,
Thorsten Behrens has been working on OpenOffice.org/StarOffice
for two years by now, mostly in the areas graphics core
engines and accessibility. His main interests
include 2D and 3D computer graphics, as well as computer
vision and image analysis.
Internationalization and Localization of
OpenOffice.org - The Indian Perspective
Shikha G Pillai, Bhupesh Koli
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing
(formerly NCST)
India supports a culturally and linguistically diverse population,
majority of whom are excluded from the productive usage of information
technology due to the lack of standardized and economical
Indian language enabled software.
OpenOffice.org is the leading office productivity suite through
open-source initiatives, available with a rich feature set across
all main platforms, along with internationalization and localization
support for major International languages. This paper examines the
development aspects, usage and prospects of OpenOffice.org
internationalized and localized to cater to the Indian market.
Most Indian scripts originate from the Brahmi script and follow complex
rules of layout involving consonants, vowels, special symbols,
conjuncts and ligatures. Unicode encoding for Indian languages
establishes a similar pattern among the scripts. In this paper,
we will examine this pattern and how the orthographic rules can be
used to develop Complex Text Layout algorithms for Indian scripts.
Also explored are storage and rendering aspects of Indian text,
along with font technologies suitable for Indian scripts.
The Internationalization(i18n) and Localization(l10n) framework
of OpenOffice.org sets guidelines for localization and
internationalization work of the suite in other languages.
The project .BharateeyaOO.o. (http://www.ncb.ernet.in/bharateeyaoo)
commenced on the lines of these frameworks, to achieve Indian
language support in OpenOffice.org. With initiatives for
localizations in major languages of India, Complex Text Layout support,
Indian locales, dictionary support and collation algorithms,
the project aims at a completely Indianized office suite
packaged economically for the Indian user.
This paper concludes with an insight into the development,
implementation details and progress of this project.
Biography:
Shikha G Pillai and Bhupesh Koli are staff scientists at
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing
(formerly NCST), Bangalore, researching in Indian
language processing, script encoding, font technology and
globalization aspects. They have been involved for the
past 21 months, in the project .BharateeyaOO.o. for development
of localization and internationalization support for major
Indian languages in OpenOffice.org. Their work has been
registered at
http://l10n.openoffice.org/localization_responsibilities.html
