The
OpenOffice.org KDE Integration project has been launched today.
Maybe you remember
Cuckooo,
a KPart allowing OOo to be embedded in the Konqueror window (as a viewer).
In the meantime this has evolved into an
OpenOffice.org Qt port and the development does not stop there.
KDE Integration is now an official
"Incubator" project at
OpenOffice.org, which means that it has been accepted by the OpenOffice.org community and if it continues well, it will become an official "accepted" project.
You can help with the development and speed it up. You can subscribe to
its
mailing lists, download the sources and code!
As many people have been asking for a KDE compatible look for OpenOffice.org
a KDE Native Widget Framework subproject has been added to the main page
as well.
It has not started yet but if there are volunteers that want to
work on it they are very welcome! I will try my best to help you.
More information about OOo's Native Widget Framework can be found
here
and
here.
Comments
What?! I had no idea this was in the works. Way cool!!
What means it for KOffice ?? It is better to concentrate on OOo instead KOffice??
KOffice is still a nice, lightweight, fast suit.
Really interesting project.
OOo is now, koffice is the future ;-)
Exactly the way I see it! Frankly, openoffice is a great program functionality-wise. However, koffice is lighter, cleaner, MUCH faster, and offers a somewhat fresher take on office software (rather than emulation of ms office interface). As it improves (filters being the most important improvement), I think a lot of people will begin to use it instead.
On the other hand, OOo's flash export is cool :)
I am definitely against this unnecessary project of integration OOo in KDE!
KDE looses its authenthicity and european originality.
KDE should work on KOffice - it`s original programme!
OpenOffice.org had done a very important break in a time for the success of Linux. But it happened because there was very little work on KOffice or none from the begining up to the last times. I know it very vell! KDE people neglected KOffice, they underestimated the world of fonds, writings, colors and so - they knew only codes and coding. So OpenOffice.org came in as a crucial necessity.
KDE should be concentrated less on mass of new and new whim programmes, but explicitly on creative developement of KOffice!
You're kidding -- 'looses its authenticity and european originality'? Didn't StarOffice (what OpenOffice was opened from) start as a German companies project? Just because Sun 'owns' it now doesn't change it's European heritage ...
Now - I don't disagree about your perspective on KOffice ...
Plus this hole "European identity" doesn't mean anything !
Aren't open source projects international and open for everybody, whatever their country or ethnicity are !?
I agree, it is not important at all where it comes from. It should be open for everybody.
Greetings
Tim
Not only that, but much of the StarOffice hacking still takes place in Hamburg, Germany. There are even internships and diploma theses being offered for students to hack on OpenOffice.
What it means? Not much. All the expert/enthusiasts with knowledge about file formats, filters, text rendering, spreadsheet calculations and so on will continue to work on KOffice.
moreover, i think that open source community (KDE to begin) should concentrate more on optimization of existing code.
why gnome still alive? it's faster then kde. i prefer kde mainly because of it's integration and .NET style. But for some people speed is the main reason.
Such big companies as IBM are donating open source development, but they ain't interested in oprimization cause they sell hardware first of all (so if linux was fast enaugh, people wouldn't buy new hardware)
This looks very promising, I just hope it doesn't mean taking attention away from KOffice.
I think KOffice is a great project with great potential, and I wouldn't like seeing KDE taking a "shortcut" by replacing KOffice with OOo. One of the reasons why I like KDE so much is how it always choses to make things from the ground up instead of adopting existing implementations. I don't think there's such a thing as "reinventing the wheel" in software. Take Konqueror for example, KDE chose not to take Mozilla or any other existing browser and so now we have a _great_ lightweight browser. The same could happen to KOffice eventually, I think it has the potential, it just hasn't got enough momentum so far.
Otherwise, very cool project :)
FYI, Konqueror is actually older than Mozilla..
KFM is older than Mozilla, but I don't think that any HTML rendering code from KFM is used by Konqueror...
I assume gecko has also been rewritten a few times..
Actually Netscape always wanted to call their browser Mozilla -- it just never caught on. "Mozilla" was the browser made by Netscape. It's been in the user agent string since the beginning...
> One of the reasons why I like KDE so much is how it always choses to make things from the ground up instead of adopting existing implementations.
Which is not true. Think of libxml2 (for whose usage KDE sometimes gets dissed because some consider it GNOME technology), fribidi, lcms, xine-lib and many other libraries.
>Think of libxml2 (for whose usage KDE sometimes gets dissed because some consider it GNOME technology),
That's FUD.
1. libxml2 _is_ in fact being used in some places.
2. For many things, the Qt XML classes are more convenient (Unless you need a validating parser, that is).
Same for fribidi, Qt has a pretty good bidi mechanism included. So this is all about pragmatic choices rather than about pseudo-political decisions.
Cheers,
Daniel
Agreed. libxml is good for the purposes for which it is intended. The stuff over Gnome libraries and CORBA is more complex, because adopting those in a big way means changing the structure of KDE (not going to happen) and dictates to KDE how it will be developed. I like the KDE peoples' attitude to D-BUS and other stuff on this basis.
> [...] and dictates to KDE how it will be developed. I like the KDE peoples' attitude to D-BUS and other stuff on this basis.
Does that mean you're against or you're for using D-BUS and other things of freedesktop.org?
D-BUS is different. It is desktop independent and it isn't a Gnome technology. The Gnome people have had huge rows about using it - perhaps because they would have to change evrything :).
not much more to say really. koffice is fantastic and will no doubt one day be the office suite of choice but it's still some way off from that. In the meantime, a Qt'ed up OpenOffice.org sounds like a great stopgap measure. Of course it'd be nice if OOo just used Qt from the ground up, the standard VCL is sucky on all platforms... oh, and it'd make a MacOS X version a breeze...
Hey, Apple, you want a really good project to sponsor? Look here!
Apple is working on their own solution
Name or link plz?
I've asked myself the same thing many times... "Why isn't OO using Qt as their toolkit?". I know there isn't a free version of Qt for Win32, but to me it'd make since for Qt to donate licenses to all developers as a way to promote Qt. OO is a key component to the success of Linux on the desktop, which would mean a better audience for Qt to sell their product.
Anyway, This is all just gut instinct looking in, without a detailed knowledge of what's gone on with OO. *shrugs* But I'd definitely like to know!
> I know there isn't a free version of Qt for Win32, but to me it'd make since for Qt to donate licenses to all developers as a way to promote Qt.
Another way would be to offer a special Qt-License for Win32 allowing OOo development.
Check this out!
http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/qt3-win32/
qt3-win32 has improved a *lot* over the last few months, mostly due to the efforts of Ivan Deras. With some patching, I've gotten Qt Assistant and Designer to work, although the later crashes after some use. However, most drawing issues are quite well implemented, and even complicated widgets like QTextEdit work quite well.
Jan, you absolutely rule!
And yes, I'm pretty sure that the people who are currently working on KOffice won't be the same people who are working on OOo. The codebases and philosophies are just completely different.
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of working with projects outside KDE. OpenOffice is stable and usefull _today_.
Support for OOo is important because it could be the deciding factor btween KDE and GNOME. Not technical merit, but skins, hacks, etc... are today Gnome best arguments to say it is more "integrated". And to say the truth, KDE in general did make less effort to coopt external projects than GNOME/GTK does: Mozilla, OOo, oGo?, etc... I hope this is changed now.
It is not true that GNOME "integrates" better with the above mentioned projects: it is skinning stuff mainly. But this may not be true in the future. Then, it may make a difference. So you are correct. The time to move is _now_.
I think the KDE community already perceived this. See George Staikos http://dot.kde.org/1069632528/ , Aaron Seigo and others really changing this, working on many fronts, like freedesktop.org, fedora project etc... On technical merit, my opinion is that KDE is the winner.
I would also like to mention Craig Drummond work integrating KDE to Gtk apps (GtkQt, QtCurve, etc...). Thanks, Craig. Your work is _really_ appreciated. Makes kde feel more polished.
There could be more systematic use of kde-look.org stuff inside one of the kde optional modules.
Congratulations for the announcement, and I really hope this project succeed. This are exciting times. it is a challenge. I hope I can do something about it.
> KDE in general did make less effort to coopt external projects than GNOME/GTK does: Mozilla, OOo, oGo?
Correct me: khtml was there before Mozilla went OpenSource, KOffice was there before OOo, Kolab before oGo. There was a part to run the Mozilla rendering engine inside Konqueror, but it didn't receive much interest. Also there seems to be no real interest/need to have a Qt/KDE browser based on Gecko (just compare how many browsers using GTK/GNOME widgets exists: Nautilus extension, Galeon, Epiphany, Atlantis, Firebird). OOo cooperation is running as you see. Finally, oGo and Kolab can be integrated/work together AFAIK. And I think I heard about a oGo kdepim connector prototype.
You miss the point: they can be older or younger, better or worse. But they have an active development community. And if you don't work with them, they will work with somebody else. We should try to make integration easy. Otherwise, it will be KDE vs the world.
I am n_not_ saying that KDE is not working on it. I am just saying this is important.
Why use Mozilla?
Apple managed to make the fastest browser in the world
using KHTML. So why shouldn't KDE use the best of the best too...
Mozilla also displays many non-compliant pages better than Konqueror. It has that very cool 'Venkman' javascript debugger.
I can also 'flatten' the horizontal menubar and toolbar at the top with just one click, increasing my area for viewing web content. (And I can restore either one or both with one click when I want to re-display the corresponding bar.) In Konqueror, crawling into the 'Settings / Toolbars' is much less convenient, and I have to restore the menubar to get at the 'Settings' even if that isn't the bar I want to restore or hide.
The auto-learning junk mail control works very well, and the explicit User Filters are easy to configure.
If you've got a speed problem with Mozilla, maybe you need to buy a $30 CPU upgrade on Ebay. Mozilla is a bit piggish on memory, but it runs fine for me with 256MB. (That's PC-100, integrated cheapo graphics, and an old Athlon 900-200FSB.)
Have you tried Mozilla lately? I think that the rate at which it is improving has been very impressive.
Proper OpenOffice.org integration will make KDE that much more interesting for enterprise deployment, which is what we need right now. ROCK ON.
Jan, I am very excited to see you working on this. I hope Xandros or one of the KDE specific distributions helps you out with some work. I wanted to join your mailing list, but I can't find a valid link. The link to the development archives is not working. How to sign up for the development mailing list?
> I hope Xandros or one of the KDE specific distributions helps you out with some work.
Indeed.. I really think it would be highly useful for a KDE-specific distro to sponsor Jan on his work. Someone like Mandrake (Gert even made a comment about OOo integration w/ KDE being important to Mandrake on his interview on KDE::Enterprise), Novell/SUSE, Lindows, Xandros, Lycoris, Connectiva, TurboLinux, RedFlag, etc..
You have to be registered on the openoffice.org pages. If you are logged in, you can see the "Subscribe" buttons. The archives seem not to work, because there are no messages in them yet:)
This is a bug I think ( with the previous web infrastructure you did not need to be a member ).
Really, this is great news. The lack of integration between KDE and OOo, more specifically the fact that it did not take full advantage of the printing infrastructure provided by KDE was always a sore point for me.
(I could say the same about Mozilla, BTW.)
I have not read the other comments, neither have I looked at the articles/pages linked to, yet. So sorry if I ask something that has been addressed elsewhere, but do we have a timetable, here?
Within the next 7-12mo would be great, as there are a handful of comitees I'm aware of who are *really* thinking of taking alternative to the M$ Desktop in consideration for the next corporate desktop standard (this is not a joke)... I guess the rash of M$-centric worms and other high-impact exploits during last year has shaken up a few more corporate Mucky-Mucks than we think.
About printing integration, just configure "kprinter" as print command line in Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, Acrobat Reader and others.
Indeed, more specifically in the openoffice.org Printer Administration tool change the properties of the generic printer so that the command line is kprinter --stdin (will probably be lpr -P by default). Has always worked for me, just need to remember to do "Print this directly" so I don't get two printer dialogs.
I suppose something like that would work for Mozilla though I have never really understood a) people who feel the need to print web pages b) people who use mozilla when they run KDE, so I'm probably not the guy to ask in this case.
And the linux version of Acrobat Reader is like pulling teeth, I mean there is a reason people don't write Motif apps anymore. KGhostView is fine for most things these days, and KPdf looks like being able to deal with the shortfall.
However, the most important thing isn't how it looks or what icons it uses. It's the general integration into KDE that matters - fonts, antialiasing, printers, DCOP, KParts.
thats why we have koffice (:
I really need the best OOo-KDE integration possible.
There are many environments where you have to coexist Linux and Windows machines and OOo is the only office suite that can work on both environments, so it is the only solution available.
But right now OOo is kind of isolated in its own world and this is bad.
As others already said, being able to use KDE printing functionality, adressbook, open/save dialogs, etc. from OOo out of the box is just what we need.
I like KOffice and as time goes on it could end being a real alternative, but we need OOo now!
Please go on with this effort, I wish many others join in to make this project progress as fast as possible.
> being able to use KDE printing functionality, adressbook, open/save dialogs, etc. from OOo out of the box is just what we need
If possible, it would be sooooo great ! KPrinter is so cool, I even use it when printing with OO.org, though I actually get two print dialogs, where the first one (native OO.o) is the annoying one....
OO.org is the de facto for businesses and this is really needed.
...eyes wide shut.... MS Office is the de facto for businesses. Sad, but true...
But not for _all_ businesses.
Some ven refuse doc:s in favour of pdf.
So it it is not that black or white.