[Scribus] Article on UNO Programming

[Craig Ringer]

On Sat, 2005-09-10 at 00:28 +0200, Christoph Sch?fer wrote:
> Hi Manuel,
> 
> I think it was Craig Ringer who intends to write something like a bridge 
> between OO.o and scribus in the future. The reason was that OO.o can 
> handle lots of file types (among them Word and WordPerfect). By using 
> UNO, it wouldn't be necessary to write import filters from scratch and 
> let OO.o do the job instead.

That's right. Unfortunately, UNO is complex, I understand it's not very
portable, and I suspect it'd be a decent sized job to write a UNO-based
generic importer. I'm not volunteering ;-) .

I'm also not sure I'm too enthused about the build integration required.
It might get easier with OO.o 2.2, as they've separated UNO out of OO.o
now and with 2.2 (I think) should be using the separated version instead
of the bundled one.

> > Are you planning to write Scribus as a set of UNO components?
> > It would be great!!
> 
> I don't think this will ever happen, but others are in a better position 
> to answer this question ;)

Argh... I don't even want to think about it.

Some sort of external access API would be cool, but I really doubt UNO
is that API. A lightweight XML-RPC setup might be interesting. While
linux-specific, control over D-BUS might also be promising. I'm curious
to see what the KDE folks will use in KDE4, since it sounds like they
have plans to do something that other non-KDE apps should be able to
talk to as well.

--
Craig Ringer