User talk:Dnw

Project Overview

.

The role of the Bibliographic Project (OOoBib) is to support the OpenOffice.org Writer (wordprocessing) application by enhancing the bibliographic facility. See our Vision statement for details. Our current objection to to design and build OOoBib version 0.1, which will contain the most basic functions for an usable bibligraphic facility.

For an overview of the Bibliographic project's major components and a context diagram see components.html. There is information about the current OpenOffice Bibliographic implementation. A start has been made to the Specification for this work (see the Projects Specifications folder on the Documents and Files page). Also see a attempt at an analysis of the proposed Bibliographic enhancement components and their relationships. The best place to start for finding out about development in OpenOffice is the OpenOffice.org For Developers page. An important resource is the Developer's guide which is part of the SDK (software development kit) or available online on at [1] The OOo API is based on UNO (Universal Network Objects) is the interface-based component model of OpenOffice.org. UNO offers interpretability between different programming languages, different object models, different machine architectures and different processes; either in a local network or even via the Internet. UNO components can be implemented in and accessed from any programming language for which a UNO language binding exists. We currently provide several language bindings for UNO which allows to use the API from Java, C++, OpenOffice.org Basic, Python and Common Language Infrastructure (CLI).

1st Stage, Bibliographic Facility Redevelopment

Summary

As a first step we are plan to implement the most simple changes to the OOo core code (the API basic code, and UNO mappings, but not yet the user interface code) necessary to implement basic support for -

1. As a first step we will implement the most simple changes to the OOo core code (the API basic code, and UNO mappings, but not yet the user interface code) necessary to implement basic support for: 2. Support saving and reading enhanced citation support in OpenDocument Ability to insert and display citations in OpenOffice Writer using the new format. (Note this task does not include the GUI interface to insert the citation in the new format, only the UNO interface to provide the basic function. 3. Storage of document bibliographic data in the OOo document save package and the code changes necessary to read and save that bibliographic data.

When these basic functions are built into OOo and are made assessable via the UNO, we can then use rapid prototyping development methods to design and build prototype GUI interfaces and bibliographic formatting engines. We will be able to use any of the programming languages which have OpenOffice bindings: C++, Java, Python and, of course, OpenOffice Basic. We believe that we will find more developers who can work in these languages than by insisting on C++ code from the start. Also it is much easier to build prototypes using Java, Python and OpenOffice Basic than in C++.

NB. When we have designed, built and tested the prototypes and they have been accepted by the OOo community we intend to rebuild them in C++ and to have them made part of the core OpenOffice application.

Skills required - good C++ programming and some XML skills with knowledge of, or willingness to learn, the OpenOffice UNO (see the Openoffice Developer's Guide)