Comments on: OOo (non-)vision

By: Marek Mosiewicz

Marek Mosiewicz — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 11:12:12 +0000

Why not to attack Mozilla project. They have the same. They have done all the same way. Firefox has also abstraction layer over toolkit.
Exactlly the same is for component model. They have also XUL which is not used anywhere else.
What would be great it would be to have abstract API for clossplatform C/C++ application like Firefox and OpenOffice. It should abstract canvas, font, layout, toolkit, component model, scripting, networking.
But it should be Apache2 licensed, not GPL like QT or LGPL like GTK (which will kill it in Mozilla and often in commercial applications)

By: Josh

Josh — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:52:36 +0000

Thanks for your replies. I’m glad to hear that thought is being given to gradual decoupling. Best wishes.

By: thorstenb

thorstenb — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:29:44 +0000

Josh, yep, this generally captures it. But there’s work underway, since several years, to at least loosen the coupling between OOo’s current toolkit & higher-level UI code. The goal is to have most of the code abstracted away from concrete implementation, and then be able to plug (almost) arbitrary toolkits beneath (note that using neither Gtk nor Qt is considered a smart idea on Windows or Mac).

This slowly drifts away from the actual posting, though, but might be worth a separate write-up…

By: Josh

Josh — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:12:47 +0000

So it’s essentially a short-term vs. long-term tradeoff, right? In the short run, a switchover to another toolkit/platform would require significant investment of developer resources. If a switch was not done, then, in the long run, significant investment will have to continue to be made in maintaining the current toolkit. If you let the long run be long enough (using economics speak) then these will eventually even out to be the same amount of effort required either way. The switchover requires more resources up-front, but also most likely leaves the code in a more useful, easily-maintainable state thereafter.

Of course, since I’m not an OOo developer (nor do I intend to be) I certainly can’t dictate which way to go. But, if a more “standard” toolkit/platform was being used, then I think I’d much more likely become an OOo dev sometime in the future. FWIW

By: thorstenb

thorstenb — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 07:36:28 +0000

@Josh: well, the significant advantage is that 80% of OOo code is built against this toolkit – that notwithstanding, you’re right.

But that was not my point.

By: Josh

Josh — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:03:40 +0000

Qt? Gtk+? What are OOo’s advantages over competing architectures?

One significant advantage of building OOo on a more generally used toolkit (beyond easing maintenance) would be to make the code much more inviting to outside devs. The custom stuff remains fairly obscure relative to other toolkit/platform offerings.

By: Doug Morrison-Cleary

Doug Morrison-Cleary — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:07:11 +0000

Philipp, isn’t Thorsten’s point that if OOo has such a good cross-platform toolkit, then let’s get it out there (aggressively, even) so that everyone else trying to do cross-platform development can make use of the same tools. I’m not a programmer, but listening in to programmers in several different contexts, cross-platform development seems to be in constant need of better and improving tools. What a gift OOo could make to that wider community!

By: thorstenb

thorstenb — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:52:39 +0000

@Mathias: I think we both agree that your quote accurately describes the past (and to a large extend the status quo). I introduced your quote, saying that it set me off for this rant, and that’s what it did. I fail to see any misrepresentation here, and am happy that you share most of my points – because I really believe this is to a large extend a question of mind-set.

By: Philipp Lohmann

Philipp Lohmann — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:36:34 +0000

AndersH, thorsten: we use fontconfig already on the X11 platforms (well, on the subset that actually has a fontconfig library). However most of these FLOSS “standards” mean exactly nothing on Windows or Mac. Which are platforms I wouldn’t want to drop in favor of “FLOSS standards”; running only on (SuSE ) Linux is just not good enough. We need our own abstraction layer to work platform independently. There is of course nothing keeping us from making the Unix implementations use glib or fontconfig – which we incidentally already have.

By: Mathias Bauer

Mathias Bauer — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:21:37 +0000

Hi Thorsten,

though I’m very disappointed that you took a two line quote of a long discussion on our dev-list and used it out of context. So let me correct the fundamental error I see in your blog.

Obviously you don’t make a difference between “description of status quo” and “vision” here. The quote you took from my mail describes the status quo, not a “vision”, not even a plan of what we will do in the future.

Of course we also have visions, but talk is cheap and it doesn’t help people asking for concrete actions to answer with visions. That exactly happened in said discussion that you quoted so selectively. If someone asks me to get something, I don’t tell him that I have the “vision” to give that in an unclear future. In such case I explain why it isn’t there, what we think how it could be changed and what obstacles we face. That’s what happened in the discussion that you misquoted.

OK, now about visions. I can say that I agree with you in many of your points, not in all of them. As I promised already on the dev list a few days ago, I’m going to present my “visions” for the project soon. I would be glad to discuss them with you as well as with others in a constructive way.

In concrete terms and to give an outlook, I would welcome efforts in the direction of modularization, re-usage of code inside and outside of the project.

In said discussion I supported the idea of better modularization several times and I did the same in my talk at last year’s OOo conference.
So either you willingly “ignored” that or you didn’t understand it.

At this moment I see that meanwhile you have replied on the dev-list. I’m glad that we can continue our discussion there.