SoftMaker.com

What made FireFox so populer was not the its being open source. Rather it had an open architecture for plug-ins so that many developers were able to contribute to FireFox.

What is your plan about SoftMaker office suite regarding this point?

Currently there is no plugin interface. Maybe we can add one in future versions of our software.

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Tobias Leißner
SoftMaker Software GmbH

The future will be here soon...

The next release of SoftMaker Office for Windows has an OLE Automation-compatible programming API and ships with the scripting language BasicMaker. Both will enable anybody to automate TextMaker and PlanMaker and to write add-ins.

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Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

Please investigate the architecture of Mozilla FireFox. It has an excellent plug-in architecture for all platforms, Windows-Linux-MacOSX.

OLE Automation is from the ancient history, and it is not cross platform.

Please reconsider this again.

It may be old, but it makes it possible to rewrite existing Excel and Word macros and plug-ins with a reasonable amount of work to run in TextMaker and PlanMaker. And that is a killer argument for SoftMaker Office.

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Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

Excellent point. Keep OLE Automation in place if that is the case for windows customers.

However, meanwhile, additionally, consider a broader and community supported plug-in architecture similar what FireFox guys did. Please see the following link to get what I mean.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

Thanks. I'll have a look, especially to see what kinds of add-ons Mozilla developers have invented.

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Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

OLE Automation, seriously is not useful if I am going to help extending SoftMaker.

Make it one of the following, or both:
1. .NET/Mono extension interface
2. Script using Ruby (Kexi did that, its a good example)

I think there are not much really useful app created by OLE Automation (except those terrible slow Access apps, which I rather prefer to do it on VB/C# anyway)

BasicMaker seems like trying to increase compatibility, but I doubted how much user really cares about VBA now. Indeed MS has a plan on hand to completely kill VBA sooner or later as I remember (replaced by Visual Studio for Office, targeting developer more than end user programming) It might just not worth the effort.

BasicMaker is just one of the possible OLE Automation clients for SoftMaker Office. You can just as well write OLE automated scripts using Delphi, C/C++, Python, Ruby*, whatever. You are certainly not limited to using BasicMaker.

* see for example: http://homepage1.nifty.com/markey/ruby/ ... dex_e.html

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Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

OpenOffice started to support extensions. I can say that it is extremely fruitful. SoftMaker should start a community supported extensions portal similarly.

http://extensions.services.openoffice.org

A plugin interface is already on our wishlist, but there is no fixed release date yet.

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Tobias Leißner
SoftMaker Software GmbH

Any news on extensions, SDK, or plug-in architecture??? This company looks so slow.

Not yet. Currently we are working on other important projects such as docx-support (which will be much better than in Open Office) and will investigate here at a later point.

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Sven Leßmann
SoftMaker Software GmbH