UDK tasks

Introduction

This document shall give you some ideas of what YOU can do to improve the UDK project. Give us some feedback of what YOU think is still needed within the UDK.

If you are interested in one of the tasks, post into the dev@udk.openoffice.org mailing list.

TOOLS

Title Language Required skill and familarity Expenditure Status Involved
Command line
tool for data
modifaction in a
registry
C++ LOW
C++ UNO
SimpleRegistry service
LOW NEW Jürgen Schmidt
The UDK has a registry (comparable to the windows system registry), where typed data can be stored in a tree-like structure. The registry is used to store all IDL-types and information about available services.

There currently exists the regmerge tool, that merges an arbitrary number of registries into one registry and the regview tool, that dumps data in a humanreadable form to stdout.

We lack a command line tool that is capable of deleting a certain key in the registry or allows modification of a key in the registry.

This task involves :

  1. finding requirements
  2. design the command line interface (switches,etc.)
  3. implementation
Registry editor C++
or
Java
LOW to MEDIUM

swing,
Java UNO,
SimpleRegistry service
MEDIUM to HIGH NEW Jürgen Schmidt
The UDK has a registry (comparable to the windows system registry), where typed data can be stored in a tree-like structure. The registry is used to store all IDL-types and information about available services.

We want to have a GUI tool for viewing and modifying the registry. The suggested toolkit would be SWING, because VCL currently doesn't have a good UNO interface. However it would also be possible to completely do the job with the VCL, but YOU would need to create YOUR own controls and would YOU have to live with poor documentation.

The registry is currently only accessible with C++ components, so it will be a Java application that uses native components.

Instance inspector C++
or
Java
LOW to MEDIUM

swing,
Java UNO,
Introspection service
MEDIUM to HIGH NEW Bertram Nolte
A useful GUI tool would allow to inspect an instance of an UNO object at runtime. It could display the supported services, the supported interfaces and methods and the supported properties and their values (including structs and object references).

The suggested toolkit would be SWING, because VCL currently doesn't have a good UNO interface. However it would also be possible to completely do the job with the VCL, but YOU would need to create YOUR own controls and YOU would have to live with poor documentation.

This should be implemented as a component so that it can be instantiated in different environment ( e.g. as stand alone application or from any other application).

If you are interested you could have a look at a rudimentary implementation of the Instance Inspector.

BRIDGES

Title Language Required skill and familarity Expenditure Status Involved
SOAP-UNO bridge Java
C++
HIGH HIGH IN
PROGRESS
Jörg Brunsmann
A UNO-SOAP bridge should allow a UNO programmer to call SOAP webservices simply via the UNO infrastructure without seeing the underlying XML infrastructure.

The other way round, it should allow to implement webservices, that can be called by an arbitrary ( in general not UNO ) client.

UNO-bridges for scripting languages (e.g. python,perl) C++
HIGH HIGH NEW
Jörg Budischewski
A UNO bridge for scripting languages should allow to use existing UNO components from the script language and in a second step, it should allow to implement components in the scripting language itself, so that they can be instantiated from a different language supported by UNO.

A HOWTO for this should appear in future.

C++ bridges for additional compilers C++,
ASSEMBLER
HIGH
MEDIUM
to
HIGH
-

Daniel Bölzle
We need a C++ bridge for every C++ compiler we use, because the exception handling and vtable-layout is compiler dependent.

So porting UNO to a new platform means to implement a new language binding. However, in general the existing ones need only to be modified.

GENERAL

Title Language Required skill and familarity Expenditure Status Involved
Documentation english :o) ALWAYS
IN
PROGRESS
Jörg Budischewski
Most parts of our documentation is not very well structured and german english. Some parts may be not quite uptodate. If YOU find such pieces, simply checkout the documentation, correct or improve it, and send in a patch via the dev@udk.openoffice.org mailing list.
Nice examples for the binary UNO development kits C++
or
Java
varies varies NEW
Jörg Budischewski
The binary UNO developments kit (UDK) or the Office Development Kit (ODK) contains all necessary base libraries to implement components. They shall become a standalone application beside the office. These development kits contain examples, that shall teach developers how to use UNO.

Currently there are only very few examples, some more examples would be very helpful.

Author: Joerg Budischewski($Date: 2001/08/09 13:38:59 $)
Copyright 2001 Sun Microsystems, Inc., 901 San Antonio Road, Palo Alto, CA 94303 USA.