As Christoph Noack opened a time capsule, let me do the same. Mine goes back 2 months to Sept 17/18/19 when specially invited members of the German-language OpenOffice.org community came to Hamburg. The visitors pictured above, plus me and Marcus Lange from Sun who joined the photo, were (l to r): Marcus Lange, Florian Effenberger, Daniel Stoni, Christian Lohmaier, Elizabeth Matthis (aka Liz), Thomas Hackert Uwe Altmann (not pictured: Gerald Geib, Volker Merschmann)

It was so wonderful to meet face to face people otherwise only known from email and to be able to thank them for their dedication and support. They each traveled here at their own cost (from far corners of Germany and even from Switzerland), which further shows their enthusiasm and dedication to our thriving open source product. On Thursday evening, those who were already in Hamburg met at a pub (Max&Consorten) for a first get-together. Afterward, most of us concluded the evening with a round of beers and more talk at my home---which I jokingly called "Motel Matthis".

Friday started out with a heartfelt word of welcome and thanks from Michael Bemmer, Senior Director of StarOffice/OpenOffice.org Engineering, and unfolded with a series of talks and snacks, including lunch and several smaller group meetings about special topics, until concluding at approximately 5:30 PM.

There were entertaining and informative talks by Stefan Taxhet on OOo in general, Gerd Weiss on infrastructure---including a personal tour of the server rooms to underline some of his points about the hardware, Andreas Bartel on Renaissance and Uwe Fischer on documentation, as well as tours of the engineering facility and opportunities to say hello to many of the OOo developers in real life.

At the end of the very busy but fun day, those of us who still had time went out to eat together at an Italian restaurant (maybe this was to get in the mood for the OOoCon in Italy!) and, several courageous visitors even spent a second night at Motel Matthis! This time Uwe made sure we had enough beer to let us talk long into the night. Thanks, Uwe!

Some comments I received after the visit are:

thackert: "It was interesting to become acquainted with some people I'd only known the mail address or nick of, and to hear really interesting talks as well to "sightsee" SUN. All in all a nice trip and - the best of all - a really nice stay at "Motel Matthis" with a perfect hostess (Liz!)"

floeff: "Thank you very much to everyone who made this visit in Hamburg possible! I'd never been at Sun Hamburg before, and it was a really nice day meeting old and new friends, getting insight on how the OpenOffice.org development works, and after all, we also had a lot of fun and a real great time. Liz is a wonderful hostess and we all enjoyed some very special days in a community that more and more becomes a real family."

VolkerMe: "Thank you again for such a nice day, which was very much too short for me. The opportunity to have personal talks with the engineers at SUN was so interesting, I wasn't able to discuss everything, so I hope I can come back another time. And although it has been said so often: Thanks Liz for hosting the meeting, for the well-prepared accommodation and for being our always smiling guide!

Saturday came too quickly and I had to say goodbye to my delightful guests. I hope to organize another visit to thank additional and like-wise dedicated community members in 2010.

Kind regards,
Liz

tags: community user-experience

The current setup of websites for downloading OpenOffice.org installation sets provides builds for several languages and operating systems. But nowadays a lot more are built. Unfortunately they are not that easy to find as they are on mirror servers. The most users do not know this or how to come to these mirrors.

Furthermore there was no comfortable way to download language packs (currently for 96 languages !).

Another reason is that many native language teams have only a small staff or do not have the time to test all available Release Candidate (RC) builds on all platforms for their language. However, these are very close to a final release but have not got the latest tests. But why not offering these to the users with a hint to be carefully when using?

To improve this situation and to deliver more choice we have created a new download website layout.

Main Download Page

http://download.openoffice.org

This website was enhanced to download easily the build you want. Of course the well-known (green) One-Click download remains the same easy way to get your favorite version. The same for the orange button for Developer Snapshots. The new thing is the yellow button that will guide you to the website for Release Candidates.

Full Installations and Language Packs

The improvements were done here to provide all available stable builds:

http://download.openoffice.org/other.html

The first table provides all full installation sets as stable release of the current OpenOffice.org version. The second table provides all stable language packs.

BTW:
A language pack contains only resource files for a specific language and platform to show, e.g., menus, dialogs and error messages in your language. If translated it may contain also the help content. It's a comfortable way to get several languages without to install the applications double and triple. After installation change the languages via menu "Tools - Options - Language Settings - Languages - User Interface".

Release Candidates

http://download.openoffice.org/all_rc.html

Some days ago the 100 millionth download of an OpenOffice.org build was announced. We hope to increase this impressive number with the new download websites.

Happy downloading. :-)

tags: beta build candidate download languagepack openoffice.org qa release snapshot

Developer Snapshot build OOo-Dev OOO320_m5 which installs as OOo-DEV 3.2.0 has been uploaded.

If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker.

Please use the following link:
http://download.openoffice.org/next

Release Notes:
http://development.openoffice.org/releases/OOO320_m5_snapshot.html

MD5 checksums:
http://download.openoffice.org/next/md5sums/OOO320_m5_md5sums.txt

tags: openoffice.org qa release snapshot

Developer Snapshot build OOo-Dev DEV300_m65 which installs as OOo-DEV 3.2 (subject to change) has been uploaded to the mirror network.

If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker.

Please use the following link:
http://download.openoffice.org/next

Packages are also available from extended mirror sites ( listed with an [E] ) from the ".../extended/developer/DEV300_m65" directory:
http://distribution.openoffice.org/mirrors/#extmirrors

Release Notes:
http://development.openoffice.org/releases/DEV300_m65_snapshot.html

MD5 checksums:
http://download.openoffice.org/next/md5sums/DEV300_m65_md5sums.txt

tags: openoffice.org qa release snapshot

Do not miss your opportunity to enter Christoph's time machine, if you could not attend this years OOoCon in Orvieto. Even if you have attended, it gives you the possibility to see the conference from a non-developers point of view. Enjoy!

Best regards,

Frank

tags: ooocon oooocon2009 renaissance user-experience

New-style service constructors in OpenOffice.org Basic

Starting with OpenOffice.org 3.2 OpenOffice.org Basic allows to use UNO new-style service constructors (for more details please see http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide/ProUNO/Services).

To achieve this UNO services are now mapped to OpenOffice.org Basic objects. They have to be addressed by using the complete UNO namespace path. Let's take the example from the "Service Constructors" section in the wiki page mentioned above completed by a dummy module:

module com { module sun { module star { module foo {

service SomeService: XSomeInterface {

create1();

create2([in] long arg1, [in] string arg2);

create3([in] any... rest);

};

}; }; }; };

Then the service object can be addressed like this:

Dim oSomeServiceObj

oSomeServiceObj = com.sun.star.foo.SomeService

All constructors defined for a new-style service are available as methods of its corresponding OpenOffice.org Basic object, e.g.:

Dim oSomeInstance As Object

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create1()

' or

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create2( 42, "Hello" )

' or

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create3( aVarOfAnyType )

Internally the parameters are passed to the createInstanceWithArgumentsAndContext method of com.sun.star.lang.XMultiComponentFactory as Arguments sequence. The UNO default context is used both to obtain the Multi Component Factory and as Context parameter.

This is the simple version. To give more control to the user there's also another way to call service constructors similar to the one used in the C++ mapping of service constructors. In this version the UNO context can be passed explicitly to the constructor method. Then the code would look like this:

Dim oMyContext As Object

oMyContext = GetContextFromSomewhere()

Dim oSomeInstance As Object

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create1( oMyContext )

' or

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create2( oMyContext, 42, "Hello" )

' or

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create3( oMyContext, aVarOfAnyType )

In this case the passed context is used internally instead of the UNO default context.

The OpenOffice.org Basic runtime automatically chooses the appropriate version by checking the first parameter's type. If the first parameter supports com.sun.star.uno.XComponentContext and the parameter count exceeds the one of the used constructor the second version is used.

This can become a problem in one special case: If a constructor has a rest parameter and expects an object supporting XComponentContext as argument it becomes ambiguous which version should be used. It could be a call to the constructor with the intention to pass the context as an argument to the service (case 1) or with the intention to pass the context to createInstanceWithArgumentsAndContext with no argument for the service (case 2).

The solution: In case 1 it doesn't matter if no or one context is passed as parameter:

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create3()

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create3( oMyContext )

oMyContext is only used for createInstanceWithArgumentsAndContext and not passed as argument to the service.

For case 2 the context has to be passed twice

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create3( oMyContext, oMyContext )

Then the second context parameter is passed to the service. This may look a little bit strange, but it's a rather exotic scenario anyway.

If a new-style service only has an implicit constructor it's mapped to a method "create" without parameters in OpenOffice.org Basic.

tags:

Vincent Spiewak has finished his OpenOffice.org extension for converting ODF text documents to DAISY Digital Talking Books - you can find the press release here.

The extension not only creates XML content, but also can make use of different text to speech engines, so you will have fully featured talking books.

I recommend this extension for everybody who wants to create DAISY books. Binaries and source files are available on sourceforge, the license is LGPL 3.

If you never heard of DAISY before, you might want to look at the screen casts which will show you how it works.

Thank you very much for this great OpenOffice.org extension!

tags: accessibility daisy odf ooo opendocument openoffice.org xml

3 seats on the OpenOffice.org Community Council are to be taken by community members to represent their constituency. After the nomination and introduction period now the 3 elections are open.

Code Contributor Representative: candidate Jürgen Schmidt seeks the support of code contributors.

Product Development Representative: candidates Christoph Noack and Alexandro Colorado strive for the majority of votes from leads of accepted projects and incubator projects.

Native Language Representative: candidate Charles-H. Schulz seeks the support of leads of native language projects.

If you are a member of one of the above mentioned constituencies you will have received an email that invites you to participate. Please cast your vote until November 16.

It looks a bit complicated but there are descriptions available about the OpenOffice.org Community Council, its charter, the election process and the candidates for the November 2009 elections.

Thanks go to the helping hands running the elections as commissary (Louis, louis@ooo) and observers (Mechtilde, mechtilde@ooo; Sophie, sgauti@ooo).

PS: If you think you should have received an invitation please drop me, the commissary and observers a note (after a look in your spam folder ;-).

tags: community council openoffice.org

As promised the results of automated tests for release workspace OOO320 starting minor m3 to m4. Explanation of testresults from OOO320m1 to OOO320m2 can be found here. As expected in previous blog the m3 had a green state as all features covered by automated tests had no issue. But unfortunately Issue 106678 put a spoke on our wheel and shredded all results in OOO320m4. Thats why this high number of errors and warnings made this build from our point of view useless. The reason why this issue wasn't found by automated tests in CWS impress180 is currently unknown. However see the graph on quality progress:

tags: automated_tests qa

tags: java odf odfdom xml