Open APIs and Plug-in Architecture

[erika]

What made FireFox so populer was not the its being open source. Rather it had an open architecture for plug-ins so that many developers were able to contribute to FireFox.

What is your plan about SoftMaker office suite regarding this point?

[Tobias-L]

Currently there is no plugin interface. Maybe we can add one in future versions of our software.

[martin-k]

The future will be here soon...

The next release of SoftMaker Office for Windows has an OLE Automation-compatible programming API and ships with the scripting language BasicMaker. Both will enable anybody to automate TextMaker and PlanMaker and to write add-ins.

[erika]

Please investigate the architecture of Mozilla FireFox. It has an excellent plug-in architecture for all platforms, Windows-Linux-MacOSX.

OLE Automation is from the ancient history, and it is not cross platform.

Please reconsider this again.

[martin-k]

It may be old, but it makes it possible to rewrite existing Excel and Word macros and plug-ins with a reasonable amount of work to run in TextMaker and PlanMaker. And that is a killer argument for SoftMaker Office.

[erika]

Excellent point. Keep OLE Automation in place if that is the case for windows customers.

However, meanwhile, additionally, consider a broader and community supported plug-in architecture similar what FireFox guys did. Please see the following link to get what I mean.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

[martin-k]

Excellent point. Keep OLE Automation in place if that is the case for windows customers.

However, meanwhile, additionally, consider a broader and community supported plug-in architecture similar what FireFox guys did. Please see the following link to get what I mean.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

Thanks. I'll have a look, especially to see what kinds of add-ons Mozilla developers have invented.

[goodwill]

OLE Automation, seriously is not useful if I am going to help extending SoftMaker.

Make it one of the following, or both:
1. .NET/Mono extension interface
2. Script using Ruby (Kexi did that, its a good example)

I think there are not much really useful app created by OLE Automation (except those terrible slow Access apps, which I rather prefer to do it on VB/C# anyway)

BasicMaker seems like trying to increase compatibility, but I doubted how much user really cares about VBA now. Indeed MS has a plan on hand to completely kill VBA sooner or later as I remember (replaced by Visual Studio for Office, targeting developer more than end user programming) It might just not worth the effort.

[martin-k]

BasicMaker is just one of the possible OLE Automation clients for SoftMaker Office. You can just as well write OLE automated scripts using Delphi, C/C++, Python, Ruby*, whatever. You are certainly not limited to using BasicMaker.

* see for example: http://homepage1.nifty.com/markey/ruby/ ... dex_e.html

[erika]

OpenOffice started to support extensions. I can say that it is extremely fruitful. SoftMaker should start a community supported extensions portal similarly.

http://extensions.services.openoffice.org

[Tobias-L]

A plugin interface is already on our wishlist, but there is no fixed release date yet.

[erika]

Any news on extensions, SDK, or plug-in architecture??? This company looks so slow.

[sven-l]

Not yet. Currently we are working on other important projects such as docx-support (which will be much better than in Open Office) and will investigate here at a later point.