Re: [boost] [gsoc] Suggestions on Proposal for Boost Document Library Project

Subject: Re: [boost] [gsoc] Suggestions on Proposal for Boost Document Library Project
From: Stefan Seefeld (stefan_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-03-18 12:32:24

On 18/03/15 12:18 PM, Antony Polukhin wrote:
> 2015-03-18 19:07 GMT+04:00 Stefan Seefeld <stefan_at_[hidden]>:
> <...>
>
>> Second, I don't think an interface to existing office suites is the
>> right approach to the problem. Rather, I would suggest something based
>> on existing standard technologies such as XML (and DocBook in
>> particular), to support the manipulation of structured documents.
>>
> Without using existing Office suit API, student will be forced to rewrite
> the functionality of Open Office from scratch. Working with spreadsheets is
> not just parsing document, but also evaluating functions, plotting charts
> and so on... This is hell and nightmare. And it will take insane amount of
> time ( about 2,190 years of effort
> <https://www.openhub.net/p/libreoffice/estimated_cost>)
>
> So the approach with unification of APIs seems right to me.

Well, yes, that's what I meant with "manipulating documents on a
semantic level". I agree, writing this from scratch is wrong. But just
providing a programmatic interface to an office suite seems ill-designed
to me, at least for a project other than LibreOffice itself.

For Boost I think one should at least attempt to build the functionality
on top of a standard document model such as XML/DocBook.

        Stefan

-- 
      ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...