OpenOffice.org
Development digest
25th January 2004

by C.P. Hennessy

Japanese government supporting a project to add PGP digital signing of OpenOffice.org documents
Tamil OOo 1.1 Linux Build released
Using OOo's XML sax parser to construct a DOM in StarBasic (and python)
A french translation of Andrew Pitonyaks StarBasic document is available
Native Widget Framework updates
Many updates to Starbasic for compatability
German team's collection of over 50 templates
Developing Calc functions using the Scripting Framework

This weeks Issuezilla summary
This weeks CVS summary

Development News

Japanese government supporting a project to add PGP digital signing of OpenOffice.org documents

Announced on the discuss mailing list was a project to implement PGP signing of OOo files. This should complement the effort already underway by the Sun developers.

Tamil OOo 1.1 Linux Build released

The Tamil team has released a Linux test build of the Tamil localized OpenOffice.org 1.1.0.You can see a screenshot and many others in the link above. They already have a Windows build available at the location above. The announcement is here.

Using OOo's XML sax parser to construct a DOM in StarBasic (and python)

Robert Sanderson wrote this example which demonstrates several things :

Using the UCB's SimpleFileAccess to read from a file. (UCB = Universal Content Broker)
Using OOo's XML sax parser.
Creating a listener with Basic's CreateUnoListener() function.

A french translation of Andrew Pitonyaks StarBasic document is available

Some great work from the french team has produced a translation of Andrew Pitonyaks document which is a great starter for StarBasic and is full of examples

Native Widget Framework updates

Lots more work on the NWF, include this mail where Dan Williams states that the NWF should be close to feature complete in 2/3 weeks.

Also of note is that Jan Holesovsky(kendy) the KDE developer working on the NWF has been hired by SuSE. This makes a great addition to the Sun developers and the RedHat developer Dan Williams.

Many updates to Starbasic for compatability

In this email Andreas Bregas gives an overview on improvements being made to the compatability with VBA and general improvements to StarBasic:

Allow special characters as identifiers
Recursion in Basic: extend limit, currently at 500
Implement VBA Compatibility option in Basic
Change rmdir command in VBA mode
VBA compatible behaviour of Basic Dir command
Local Variable name clashes with Module Scope Variable
Public/Private keywords not supported for Procedures
Set keyword not supported fully in Star/OpenOffice Basic
Control which libraries are loaded by default in Star/OpenOffice Basic
Optional Param and Default Values
User Defined Types
Handling of nested quotes
Object Reference support
CCurr and CVar not supported
ReDim Type not Optional
Public/ Private variables
Optional parameters to UNO compoments require positional placeholders
Creation of Const String for Non Printable characters
Support Help URLs in Star/OpenOffice Basic comment fields

German team's collection of over 50 templates

The Germanophone project have a collection of over 50 templates (all under LGPL/SISSL, most covered by JCA) online.

Their next major step is to include these templates (or a subset) into OOo package.

Developing Calc functions using the Scripting Framework

Duncan Foster was wondering whether it was possible to add functions for Calc formulas in StarBasic or any other language. Niklas Nebel informed him that it was and actually that there were several ways to do this. However there will have to be some more work on the part of the Scripting Framework and the User Experience team.

This weeks Issuezilla summary

No summary this week as the digest is going out earlier than usual. However you can find all the necessary stats here.

This weeks CVS summary

Some of the interesting developments over the last number of weeks include:

week 4 (2004):

OpenOffice.org Development digest 25th January 2004