ODF Toolkit Could Radically Restructure OpenOffice

Since last June, Microsoft has been actively courting independent developers who might have an interest in building what the company calls "line-of-business" applications - essentially, functions that extend the Office applications platform into new niches.

Analysts perceived Microsoft's drive toward Office Business Applications (OBA) as one component of its Office Open XML campaign that was without equal in the open-source, OpenDocument realm. Today, the ODF community answered in kind, with the creation of a "toolkit" that beckons developers to build new functionality around the ODF platform.

The objective, say the proponents of the ODF Toolkit, is nothing less than the creation of an "ODF Universe," which could modularize the OpenOffice configuration in such a way that the application suite becomes a layer on top of a runtime environment - similar conceptually to how Microsoft's Office suite has been gradually adopting the .NET environment. OpenOffice users already know this environment as UNO. Rather than have UNO run alongside the OpenOffice application, in the new universe, UNO would run on top of it.

But as the system evolves, the toolkit would become a kind of API; and although the system's architects seem to lack the words to describe it - at least in English - this would give outside developers the hooks and handles they need to compose ODF-supportive applications that run on UNO as well, but outside of OpenOffice. This is actually a bit different from Microsoft's architecture for OBA, in which functionality is built into the new ribbon of a Microsoft Office application, rather than run separately.

Technically, a Microsoft developer could utilize either .NET or the older COM model to build an application that assembles documents in either Office's legacy formats or the new Office Open XML, though this isn't the design direction Microsoft's been pushing.

A block diagram for the ODF Universe attached to the Toolkit's public proposal (which OpenOffice.org is using to describe the completed project until more updated information becomes available) shows the Toolkit eventually providing services to the suite, though with the suite given a smaller block as the Universe evolves.

As the UNO environment provides infrastructural services to the Toolkit, it appears it will be the Toolkit component that provides document access and construction functions to both the suite and to applications created by others outside the suite.

There's a key difference between the notion of the ODF Toolkit and an OpenOffice SDK. The Toolkit, as specified, will open functionality of the types of documents that OpenOffice typically produces, to exploitation by outside programs. By contrast, the SDK (which has existed for years) is for developers seeking to modify the functionality of the suite. However, it's a little obvious that OpenOffice's architects are leaving much of the value proposition for the new Toolkit for its own users to determine.

"Developers interested in moving beyond office suite functionality to areas that express files as ODF, however 'beyond' is imagined, are invited to join," reads the project completion announcement on OpenOffice.org today. "We envision this project as giving all a hint of the potential of OpenOffice.org source and ODF."