Abstracts of Conference Papers - Thursday

This session gives an overview about the opportunities OpenOffice.org offers for developers (third party developers). It will explain different concepts (Add-ons, Add-ins, ...) and technologies how OpenOffice.org can be extended or how it can be used in own solutions. The session will demonstrate several existing solutions which emphasize the opportunities for developers and how developers can benefit from own extensions for OpenOffice.org.

Outline:

• Introduction
• Opportunities for Developers
• UNO Components in general
• Add-on Components
• Add-in Components
• Examples
• Conclusion

Demonstrate idiosyncrasies, common pitfalls, and capabilities that are not well understood in OpenOffice.org Basic programming. Although the topics are of an advanced nature, they are completely accessible to an absolute beginner, providing new insights into the behavior of macros in OpenOffice.

• Introduction
• Library management
• Arrays
• Copy by reference or copy by value
• Using the Select statement
• Implementing advanced data structures
• Using the correct text object
• Traversing text content in a Write document

The new OpenOffice.org development process differs in several aspects from usual OpenSource habits of other projects. The session will explain reasons for this differences and also discuss chances and difficulties of having an own development style. In detail we will have a look onto different roles of contributors, especially at the impact of the new development process to core-developer, QA folks and addon-developers.

Different kind of contributions can be made to the project, we will cover:

• legal aspects
• access to resources of the Projects (website, IssueTracker, etc)
• CVS access and branches
• channels of communication

In the year since the last conference, the project has only attracted a small number of new developers. One of the barriers that prospective new developers face is to try and build OOo for the first time.

Although precompiled solver tarballs can help those who do not want to compile the complete suite, the time it takes to download a solver puts many people off. These problems will get worse as the OOo project continues to grow.

In this session we will look at ways in which we can reduce the amount of time that developers and translators need to spend on their build environment instead of being productive, such as precompiled tools, providing library development packages and separating translations and other resources from the source code directories.

OpenOffice.org KDE Integration Project aims to provide tight (but optional) integration of the OpenOffice.org to the KDE environment beginning with KDE look and feel and ending with KDE data sources.

The project can be divided into its visible and its core part. The visible part includes the KDE-like look and feel, dialogs, etc., the core part focuses on the infrastructure needed for the visible part, and on the KDE data sources. Some of the work (mainly the visible part) is already available as patches to the current OpenOffice.org 1.1.x, other (most of the core part) focuses on the upcoming OOo 2.0. The most important subprojects are:

Visible:

• "KDE Native Widget Framework" provides the OOo with the look of the theme that the user chose for his KDE desktop. The framework uses the QStyle API to draw its widgets the same way a real KDE/Qt application would.
• "KDE Icons for OOo" replaces the OOo icons with the default KDE icons (CrystalSVG).
• "cuckooo" allows OOo to be embedded in the Konqueror window as a read-only KPart so that people could browse to documents recognized by OOo which would open directly in the browser.
• "KDE File Dialog" replaces the default OOo file dialog with the KDE one. This is work in progress.

Core:

• "KDE vclplug" has the goal to get OOo controlled by Qt events and drawn by Qt painting methods instead of pure X calls when running in KDE. It is developed for OOo 2.0 and is still quite experimental.
• "KIO for OOo" is planned to use the KDE's virtual file system library KIO. The work did not start yet.

This talk will describe the background of the subprojects, and compare the plain OOo with the KDEized one. It will also discuss the current status and the future plans.

Biography: Jan Holesovsky works in the SUSE Labs as an OpenOffice.org developer focusing on the KDE integration.

His first Linux experience dates back to 1995. During 1998 and 1999 he was part of a team programming KTTV, an editor of lecture notes for Linux (word processor and vector drawing program) as a school project. In 1999-2002 he worked for SUSE as a YaST2 developer, but he left to finish the school. In 2003 he graduated from the Charles University in Prague with master degree and started with the OpenOffice.org development.

In 2004 he joined SUSE again, this time as the OpenOffice.org developer.

Biography:

• libwmf, libwv, various MS File Format interoperability interests
• Sun StarOffice Hamburg Jan 2000, MSWord/RTF/etc im/ex
• Red Hat March 2004, Desktop Engineer
• Co-lead sw module

In the first part we will hear about the contributions from members of the QA project.

• confirming issues
• available types of OpenOffice.org automation
• doing localization QA
• working together with OpenOffice.org port contributors

• Statistics about the QA team
• Statistics about OpenOffice.org (IssueTracker statistics)
• About IssueTracker keywords
• writing and using testplans
• Releases
• Developer Builds
• QA events (bug day events, discussion about timezones, using IRC)

The second part gives an introduction in Automated GUI Testing. "How can the new port be tested" is often the first question after a successful build. The 'qa/qatesttool'- project is using the TestTool binary with its own environment to test the "front side" - the GUI - of OOo on many platforms.
This part of the session describes how and where to start with automated [GUI] testing of OOo. Using the 'TestTool Environment' is simple but writing own testcases is also easy with littlet BASIC skills and some knowledge about the 'TestTool Environment'.