Subject: Re: Importing Spreadsheets (Was: Re: Mime-types)
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Feb 09 2001 - 11:31:31 CST
Hub wrote:
>>To do this we basically need Gnumeric. This is what Bonobo is for.
>
>What about cross-platform compatibility ? I thought that Bonobo wath only
>under GNOME. So how do we do under BeOS, Win32, QNX and MacOS ?
Breaking compatibility isn't a huge concern of mine, and I'll explain why.
I've been thinking of ways to generically implement an XP embedding model.
This is a bit difficutlt, as one might imagine.
My current thinking goes something like this:
1) We already have a healthy distinction about XP interfaces and P-specific
implementations of (at least parts of) those interfaces (or think of them as
abstract/semi-abstract classes if you will)
2) We have a fairly good idea about how to draw and handle square-ish
figures, as is displayed by our image code. This code can be moved into a
more generic layer if need be
3) We have a mechanism for embedding arbitrary data inside of our file
format (through use of the d and data tags). We also have a mechanism for
turning these blobs of data into displayable objects (PTO_OBJECTs). We do
this for images currently. This will probably need to be expanded upon,
however.
So we have the ability to handle squarish things, and store these things in
our file format pretty easily. What we need first and foremost is an
activation framework and the ability to capture the graphics context of the
embedded application, and that is most certainly platform specific (and
probably non-trivial).
So in short, I'm working out a way such that if your platform can support an
embedding framework, you can implement a few base classes to get embedding
in Abi to "just work." Good examples such embedding models are Bonobo and
OLE2/OCX. Other platforms may have this ability, but I am not personally
familiar with them. If not, they are more than welcome to ignore the data
"stream" within the document :) I figure that if this is implemented, the
GTK+ port will either do this or perhaps try to intelligently span an
external application, for instance.
This is more of a "pipe dream" of mine anyway. Other things are more
important currently, IMHO.
Dom
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