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Released: Apache OpenOffice 4.1.15

Abstracts of BOF Sessions - Thursday

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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.

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Native language project knowledge exchange (BOF)
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.

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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.
Biography:

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Legal Validity of Open Source licenses in Germany and Europe (BOF)
Dr. Axel Metzger Director of the Institute for legal Questions on Free and Open Source Software
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.
Biography:

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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.

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Abstracts of BOF Sessions - Thursday

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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.

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A new Toolkit / Canvas for OpenOffice.org (BOF)
Thorsten Behrend Star Office Entwicklungs GmbH
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.

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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

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