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

Subject: Re: [boost] [gsoc] Suggestions on Proposal for Boost Document Library Project
From: Anurag Ghosh (ghoshanurag1995_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-03-18 16:03:17

Sir

Could you point to the specific parts which you think make the project
hugely ambitious ? Is it that the functionalities that I'm proposing too
many (ie. the scope is too broad) or that the different API's I'm thinking
to cover over different platforms a bit too difficult to achieve ?

Thanks

Anurag Ghosh

On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 10:02 PM, Stefan Seefeld <stefan_at_[hidden]>
wrote:

> 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...
>
>
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