BP204 - Integration of OpenOffice and Lotus Notes and Domino

Alan Bell and John D. Head delivered the session. In the opening statement Alan promised to show code, code, code. To build up suspense Alan promised that Example 8 will blow our minds. John gave a brief overview of OpenOffice.org and the fact that it implements the   ISO/IEC26300 standard for office document. OO uses UNO (Universal Network Object) to access OpenOffice. The equivalent of a NotesSession in OO is the ServiceManager, the equivalent to NotesUIWorkspace is com.sun.star.frame.Desktop. Alan walks though the code to put Hello World into the text editor, the spreadsheet and the presentation editor. They stressed the point that the code is the same for similar tasks, so the learning affordance is quite low. The documentation is very extensive with the developer guide exceeding 1000 pages. However the API documentation is more geared towards Java and C, so it takes time to get used to.
On with some example: Complex table, mail merge and a spreadsheet that uses a Spreadsheet class (courtesy Alan Bell) to abstract the interaction. Inside the Spreadsheet class works a list of columns. Columns contain lists of cells and cell is a class where all the work goes. Alan shows how to transfer RichText formatting from Notes views to spreadsheets. John then showed the direct creation from PDF from a Notes document. Then John showed that all OpenOffice examples run natively in the productivity editors of Lotus Notes 8 (availability to be determined).

What I liked
Cool usable code.

What I didn't like
nothing.