[Open Office] Generic desktop adapter (proposal & prototype)

[Jan Holesovsky]

Hi Norbert,

On Monday 28 November 2005 14:40, nf2 wrote:

> Perhaps this is interesting for you. I would like to get some
> feedback from people which have practical experience with integrating
> 3rd party applications like openoffice.org into desktop environments.
>
> The aim of the "Generic dasktop adapter" is to provide a standardized
> interface between applications and desktops (for filechoosers and VFS).
> The concept is simple: Applications load the appropriate desktop-adapter
> with dlopen(), depending on the desktop they are running in:
>
>      * libdadapt-kde-1.0.so
>      * libdadapt-gnome-1.0.so
>      * libdadapt-xyz-1.0.so

Basically, it is the same what OOo does for its desktop integration, so in 
fact, this is a solved issue ;-)  But I understand what you mean by your 
proposal in general.

OpenOffice.org does the desktop integration through so-called 'vclplugs' for 
the theming of widgets, or through its component architecture (UNO) for the 
Gnome/KDE file dialogs, or address books.  But the principle is the same, 
dlopening appropriate .so's according to the desktop it runs in.  OOo does 
not need a common (Gtk+ + Qt) main loop for this, it uses just the features 
that are currently available.

The main problem I see with your approach is that you will have to support 
each and every feature the target application uses.  E.g. in case of OOo, 
file dialog is not just two simple calls like ShowTheFileDialog() and 
GiveMeTheSelectedFiles(); OOo has to have full control over the dialog, like 
adding new widgets there, modifying content of them according to the selected 
files, and more.  I believe other applications will have other special wishes 
and needs, so my opinion is that this would be a maintainance nightmare.

I think that the interesting thing here would be doing it vice-versa.  For 
example, merge the functionality of gnome-vfs and KIO so that the current 
gnome-vfs or KIO would be just wrappers for the 'merged VFS'.  This would 
make the maintainance easier - two teams would be interested in fixing 
bugs ;-) -, the really desktop independent applications could use the 'merged 
VFS' directly, and the KDE/Gnome application programmers would still have the 
API they are used to.  But no idea whether it is technically possible at 
all ;-)

What do you think, would you be interested in looking into this?

Regards,
Jan