So far I haven’t been going to any technical talks, and today (the last day) was a now or never. I went to the Juerguen talk about extension, he talked about the metadata of the extension integration. New things like update information with a more custom icons options, license, and descriptions of the extension. He show the the anatomy of the description.XML Things like version, identifier language, and xlink:href to the text files.
Option page and help integration makes also added support for complex user interfaces. The help-files can be useful, a tip is use the parameter HELP_DEBUG=1 (environmental variable) to display help identifier, this makes it easier to make a relationship between the help id.
Option page will be integrated in the OpenOffice.org Writer section so it’s possible to make it more seamless with the OOo interface. The same goes with help integration.
Juerguen later showed the netbean project to show how the license worked as well as the options integrated with the stored options interface of OOo.
He later talked about the external libraries and how to handle external libraries through a getClasses() function to load external files.
Secure connections through HTTPS and certification handling is now supported which allow you to validate and verify the the validation of the certification so there are many functions develop for the handling of the connection.
Other feature was the password container which integrates with the internal password manager. The passwordContainer() interface under the star.tasks.Password container uses the interactionHandler().
The new UI controls looked great including the TreeControl, GridControl as well as tool panels that are more accessible. This will make the extension presentation much appealing to users. All of them are on the com.sun.star.ui.XUIElementFactory/XUIElement/XToolPanel. The XCU to be used under the Factories.xcu which will include the new element under the “FactoryImplementation” reference. Another xcu is the custom WriterWindowsState.xcu.
Next talk was also another developer talks about UNO components by Mihaela Kavikova. This time it was the new AWT UNO visual components that where mentioned during the extension presentation. The grid control could be the star of the presentation, the AWT means abstract window toolkit the api is at com.sun.star.awt.
The way Dialogs are handled and explained using the AWT service with the different interfaces like UnoControlDialog, XControlModel, and the different properties using the XPropertySet like the position values like the setPropertyValue(“property”, Integer(value)); example:
sPSetButton1.setPropertyValue(“PositionY”, new Integer(230));
She showed the different controls and later went into more complex UI’s. She went on into the use case which I thought was quite neat, and how an application that drop info into a listbox, then she address the issues of what a listbox could have including the lack of flexibility. That’s when the grid control came to show, the control is quite neat, it allows you to create columns and rows, the code comes from the com.sun.star.awt.grid.GridColumn which you intangible through the xMultiComponentFactory.createInstanceWithContext();
There are some methods to the grid columns such as setTitle setColumnWidth, or setResizable(flase/true). The grid also supports integer and graphics, which I thought was quite neat. Other properties includes the propertyValue such as column, grid data and others like the Tabstop to be able to browse through tabstop. Other optionals properties includes background color, line color, text color, and alignments on vertical or top. Most of the Grid stuff can be found here(http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/API/UNO_AWT/Grid_Control). Future improvements include sort columns edit cells and more complex data input such as tab control, frame control. Biggest drawback is that is not usable from basic, just Java which probably is not available on the scriptable framework.
After the conference I had a good talk with Juerguen about the things that we might need to cover to really improve the development environment. It seems that we have the issue that everyone is contributing on their own little bubble but don’t really communicate with the rest of the community. Things as simple as adding a commenting functionality to the development documentation seems to be a daunting task that he can just not provide. Yet like other comments from the talk happened, if the users are asking for it, it becomes more important than what it seems.
The ODF Framework sounded a bit jargony, it was a study on quality assurance for ODF. First it was a study on the client, the vendors and the Developer for ODF based products. The ODF alliance seems to be in the middle of this and they pushed the technology across the industry. The study had specific goals to each profile, includes the comparison of products based on their quality, vendors evaluate the increase of costumers based on a clearer whitepaper report.
To build the report they identify the requirement against the evaluation process, took the existing evaluation and measured the process against the requirement. After a bit I had to change the presentation to a lighter one about Italo’s PLIO organization and how OpenOffice.org. The talks seemed great since he explains some of his encounters with Microsoft. He faced the Microsoft organization and how the whole standards debacle. He also document the whole process and show the likes and the unlikes on the article. He even put the google search to albergati and openoffice.org and the document comes first and he is listed 12 on the google images from the search.
Tags: Budapest, conference, OOoCon, OpenOffice.org
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