CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2010/ch7 S36 JB

O-O packages for implementing office suite APIs

Introduction

Office suite software has been around now for many years. The first was Microsoft Office, released in 1989, which included a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation program. These were separate programs which were integrated together into a single package. For many years, Microsoft has remained the dominant player in the game, but not the only one. Others have come (and sometimes gone) that have had their own popularity. Although all of them have tried to provide every function they thought their users might need and/or want, none of them are perfect. Many users have identified shortcomings or wished for special features that are not available in their favorite office suites. Some of the suite providers have recognized this and now offer Application Interfaces (APIs) that allow people to access core functions of their software from outside of the program, using separate scripts or programs. This chapter is a review of the APIs available in various suites and some of the packages that are available to different Object Oriented (OO) languages for implementing this API.

The Office Suites

There are many different office suites. Below we review a few of the more popular ones that can be easily found today.

OpenOffice

OpenOffice is a free office suite provided as Open-source Software (OSS) by Oracle (previously by Sun Microsystems and before that by Star Division as Star Office). It is available for many different operating systems on many different platforms.

API

Through the OpenOffice API, a user has access to manipulate files created by OpenOffice using the language of their choice. OpenOffice uses the Universal Network Objects (UNO) interface for this.

Google Docs

Google Docs is also a free office suite. It follows the recent trend of transferring more executables online, making them easily available from anywhere with an Internet connection.

API

The API for Google Docs, like for OpenOffice, is well thought out and supported. It allows for external modification and control of the suite software by programs written in various languages.

Microsoft Word

Microsoft has long had a reputation for being closed and anti-competitive and entered the API game very late. It is now trying to catch up with the big boys.

API

Microsoft's API stinks!

References

1. OpenOffice.org API
2. Google Docs
3. Microsoft Word