The OpenOffice.org and StarOffice office suites are receiving an increasing popularity and the success of the Open Document Format has given this a considerable boost. Related to the growing popularity is the demand to customize or extend the existing functionality by own extensions and to integrate this in existing business workflows. Customized extensions can provide new functionality or can be the interface to other applications, e.g. integration into document management systems.

The development of extensions currently lacks IDE support, so we have started our StarOffice/OpenOffice.org NetBeans Integration plugin to simplify the development of office extensions. StarOffice/OpenOffice.org offers an API to program with or for the office. It allows to automate tasks remote or in process and to extend the office with completely new functionality.

The NetBeans integration simplifies the access and usage of the API in new projects and also the task of creating complete office extension packages (comparable to NetBeans plugin modules).

The work on the plugin is still ongoing and we will introduce new features in the future. We would like to invite you to take a look on our plugin, play with it, test it and give us constructive feedback on either the api developers mailing list (where you have to be subscribed) or to me directly.

Current Preview Version

The current preview version of our org-openoffice-extensions.nbm supports:

• UNO IDL (syntax highlighting, file type for UNO IDL)

• context sensitive help and code autocompletion for Office API types

• new project types (UNO client application, Calc Add-Ins, general UNO components) with wizard type dialogs

The wizards for the new project types collect the necessary information for the project type and generate a new project with all necessary files including new UNO IDL files (if necessary) and code skeleton files which only have to be extended later on. The new generated projects are buildable and runnable out of the box without any further editing because all interface methods are default implemented. In case of office extensions it is possible to create the extension package directly from within the IDE and deploy it into the configured office installation.

Outlook

As I mentioned before, the work on the plugin is ongoing and for future versions of the plugin we plan to support:

• smooth debug support for office extensions

• more new project wizards, for example a specialized project wizard for Add-On extensions

• Scripting support, means the ability to use the NetBeans IDE to develop Java macros for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org including debug support, deployment into documents and the office environment and vice versa

• and more

Usage

For more detailed information and to find installation instructions and requirements please take a look at the StarOffice/OpenOffice.org NetBeans Integration wiki documentation.

This blog entry was created and published using the Sun Weblog Publisher for OpenOffice.org and StarOffice.