[Scribus] Article on UNO Programming

[Gregory Pittman]

Christoph Sch?fer wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> in the recent discussion on collaboration features, the creation of a 
> "universal file importer" using OO.o and UNO was mentioned. For those 
> of you interested in this, Linux Journal has published an introduction 
> to UNO. It might be helpful:
>
> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8550

As far as I can tell, it looks like the idea behind UNO is like that 
behind IBM's Rexx.  When I was using Amigas, they had a port of that 
called ARexx, which was very slick when the desired programs had the 
interfaces written.  For example, while staying in Scribus, one could 
carry out operations through Gimp or OO.o without firing up the whole 
program(s) -- eg, you could import a file through another program to 
manipulate it in some way.  Even considering the idea of "open source", 
it would be a lot less work to only have to deal with the end product 
than to try to incorporate a section of someone else's code in your own.

The key to success of this is being able to see enough benefit to write 
the interprocess code, and probably best to see where it goes with OO.o 
-- one of the things that I think OO.o "suffers" from is trying to do so 
many things, and getting so big and fat, even as a modularized program.  
In some ways, OO.o needs UNO just to work with itself.

The alternative is one of the traditional hallmarks of Unix, having 
little lightweight utilities that were made to run on the command line, 
and then writing scripts to make use of them.

Greg