Re: OpenOffice 6.0 Released
I guess you already noticed this?
Slashdot Newsticker wrote:
> http://slashdot.org/articles/01/10/04/1817237.shtml
>
> OpenOffice 6.0 Released
>
> *Posted by timothy[1] on Thursday October 04, @02:56PM*
>
> *from the another-promising-one dept.*
>
> kevin@ank.com[2] was there last night when "Max Lanfranconi of the
> OpenOffice project[3] spoke to the Silicon Valley Linux User
> Group[4] on Wednesday morning's release 6.0 of the LGPL'd office
> suite. When the project was opened two years ago, it was missing
> online help, spell-checking, and printing which had been based on
> proprietary commercial libraries. With release 6 the open source
> community has replaced these missing features." Read on for some
> more information on the new release, courtesy of Kevin.
>
> "Release 6 also gets rid of the old Star Office desktop of version
> 5 which was generally disliked for its annoying tendency to cover
> up all of the other windows you were working with and make it
> difficult to interact with your X Window Manager."
>
> "The application suite has programable APIs for each of the
> applications, exposed through a custom object request broker named
> UNO. In an impressive demonstration, Max showed live update of a
> spreadsheet with real-time stock data, all under the control of a
> small Java application. Changed data were reflected throughout the
> spreadsheet table with each update as the sheet recalculated each
> cell based on the new input."
>
> "Max freely admits that there are still weaknesses in the code. He
> pointed to the ten year lifespan of the mostly C++ code base, and
> hopes to see the code improved with the use of more modern C++
> features. In browsing through the source tree I don't find that
> the code is in nearly as bad shape as Max portrayed it. Admittedly
> I've only seen a tiny fraction of the code (at 3.7 million lines,
> OpenOffice is by far the largest open source project in the
> world), but my random sampling showed very good coding practises,
> like preprocessor guards around each header include to reduce
> compile time due to reopening headers that have already been
> processed. Even with these measures in place however, the full
> system takes upwards of 15 hours and 1.5GB of disk to build on
> currently available hardware."
>
> "System load time for the office suite has been significantly
> reduced (about 20s on Max's 500MHz laptop with 128MB memory) by
> removing several libraries from the link process and instead
> loading them on demand. Over the next year or more Max hopes to
> see more modularization of the code base with the eventual goal of
> seperating the monolithic program into seperate applications
> linked together through an object request broker."
>
> "Q&A went on until we got kicked out of our room, so there is a
> lot more that is new about OpenOffice than I've described here. If
> you are interested you can pick up a copy at OpenOffice.org[5], or
> at one of its mirrors[6] around the world."
>
> Links:
> 1. http://www.monkey.org/~timothy/
> 2. mailto:kevin@ank.com
> 3. http://www.openoffice.org/
> 4. http://www.svlug.org/
> 5. http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/build_638c/build638c.html
> 6. http://www.openoffice.org/mirrors.html
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