A few things I like to clarify.
We are not announcing giving up Symphony development. IBM has business
commitment with Symphony and its users.
We are willing to contribute the whole Symphony to community. The code
would be available to the community. (The C++ part of Symphony, also
the counterpart of OO.o in Symphony). Features/Fixes which can be accepted
by community will be integrated into Apache OpenOffice. Since we
are managing Symphony development with ClearCase/Clearquest, it would be
more easier for us to do the integration. But other committers definitely
can help and speed up the work.
By far, we should focus on getting the first Apache OpenOffice release
done.
A little technical background about Symphony
1, Symphony is based on both OpenOffice.org and Eclipse technologies. It
can be seen as an OpenOffice.org instance (C++) embedded in a Java window.
The menu/toolbars and the tab windows are all implemented with the help of
IBM Expeditor(Eclipse based technology). All the C++ libraries are
packaged
and managed by Eclipse plugins.
2, Symphony provide Java interface and lotus script interface for
application developer in development toolkit. OpenOffice.org extension
won't work in Symphony.
3, A key performance improvement in Symphony is Async document loading for
Writer and Presentation documents. User can see document content get
displayed before the whole document content get loaded. It would be more
difficult to integrate this into Apache OpenOffice than other features
Symphony has
Regards.
Erik Ma
Yong Lin Ma
Architect of IBM Lotus Symphony
Am 07/14/2011 12:00 AM, schrieb Rob Weir:
> I'm sending this with my IBM "hat".
>
> I'm going to be speaking at the ODF Plugfest in Berlin Friday
> afternoon, and will be making some announcements. I wanted you to
> hear this first, before anyone else knows.
Great, thanks for this.
> [...]
>
> We will be doing the following:
>
> First, we're going to contribute the standalone version of Lotus
> Symphony to the Apache OpenOffice.org project, under the Apache 2.0
> license. We'll also work with project members to prioritize which
> pieces make sense to integrate into OpenOffice. For example, we've
> already done a lot of work with replacing GPL/LPGL dependencies.
> Using the Symphony code could help accelerate that work and get us to
> an AOOo release faster. We've already converted the help files to
> DITA, which could help accelerate that work, if we chose to go in that
> direction.
This looks like a very big step as you giveup your separat development -
at least I understand it this way.
Maybe you could tell us a bit more about when you plan to integrate the
selected code pieces? The reason for asking is the following:
I hope that we first can stabilize the original OOo code to get the
first release done - the OOo 3.4 is (OK, was) already in Beta mode, so
just a few more fixes and then we would have our release. Now at Apache
we may have to work on some dependencies to eleminate which otherwise
would prevent an official release. But I think also this is doable
within this year.
After the release is done we can make the big step to integrate the
Symphony code and move towards a new release.
An alternative would be to stabilize the 3.4 code and then branching, so
that we have a release branch
(.../repos/asf/incubator/ooo/branches/ooo34) and the normal dev branch
(.../repos/asf/incubator/ooo/trunk/). Then it's possible to work on both
- if we have enough man power to do both in parallel. ;-)
I hope you have the same process in mind. Otherwise if you thought about
to integrate the Symphony stuff and then doing our first release at
Apache, I fear it will need much more time then just a few months.
> For example, the IAccessible2 work which helps
> Symphony work better with assistive technology. I know an older
> version of this work sits in an OOo CWS someplace, but it will be
> easier to integrate that work if we start with our latest code.
Malte is knowing this part best and I hope he can help to integrate this
well.
> Also, as the PC Magazine review notes, we've done some really good UI
> work. I invite you to download Symphony [2] and take a closer look at
> this. Yes, it is different from what OOo has today. And a move of
> that magnitude has an impact on documentation and translations as
> well. But the feedback we've received from customers and reviewers
> is very positive. Do we integrate parts of the Symphony UI? That is
> something for the project to discuss and decide on.
Shame on me as I don't know much about Symphony yet but looking at the
screenshots the tabbed documents looks like a great feature.
> So that's essentially what I'll be announcing on Friday. The above
> contributions will occur over the next couple of months, starting with
> the ODF Toolkit. I hope you see the exciting possibilities as much as
> I do.
Sure, I really do.
Finally, I wish you much fun at Berlin, enjoy the beers and have save
trips. :-)
Marcus
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