A lot of people spend a good amount of time doing office suite type things on their computer. When I did more development at my last job, I did a good amount of work that centered around visual basic creating and/or modifying MS Office documents. Being able to leverage the capabilities of an office suite is very nice for at least two reasons. One is, the office suite may have some built in functionality that can save the programmer a lot of work. A couple examples might be charting through a spreadsheet application or the formatting options available in text or a spread sheet.

Along with that, delivering customers their application or data through an office suite provides them with an interface they already know. A lot of the reporting that I did in the past was delivered as an Excel spreadsheet. Management already knew the interface pretty well, and it also allowed them to do ad hoc analysis and massaging of the data. Pretty nice.

I don’t do that kind of work in my job now that I’m focused on database administration. But I still run across situations on my own, where I think about a tool that I might like to develop for my personal use. If I am doing that, I get to pick the suite and of course that means it will be OpenOffice.org.

Of course, this has already been anticipated and this kind of work, by and large falls under the OpenOffice.org Extensions project. There is an API and many examples. Much of this can be downloaded and installed in a single download by getting the OpenOffice.org Software Development Kit The SDK contains API documentation, code samples in various languages and everything else a developer would need.

I bring up all this because I was quite excited to find recently that another tool that is available is SDK integration with netbeans.

Right now NetBeans is my favorite java ide – and this extension (which is still pretty early on in development) makes it much easier to develop for OpenOffice.org with java. There are 6 project types that will ultimately be available through this tool – so far four of them are available. The four in there now are

  • Client Application Project
  • Calc Add-In Project
  • General UNO Component Project
  • Add-On Project

The two that are not in there yet are

  • Scripting Project
  • API Library API Wrapper Project

I look forward to watching these tools mature. They are really going to help provide the necessary environment for OpenOffice.org to continue to grow.