Developer's Guide Intro

The Developer's Guide should be used as the main documentation to give developers and solution providers the necessary means to use OpenOffice.org 2.2 as componentware, using it in their own projects and extending it according to their needs.
The guide gives an introduction to the main concepts of the OpenOffice.org 2.2 API and to UNO, the underlying component technology of OpenOffice.org 2.2.
All different application areas are discussed in a separate chapter. Each chapter describes the fundamental APIs for this application area, and it gives the necessary background information about how the generic APIs have to be used in this context. The APIs and the concepts are explained in detail and a working example is available in the 'DevelopersGuide' example section. The main target language for most of the examples is Java. However, for some chapters, where the focus is on a special target language, the examples are in that language (e.g. C++, OpenOffice.org 2.2 Basic).

The guide is available in two versions: a XHTML version that contains cross references directly into the UNO IDL reference documentation, and the PDF file version.

One short comment on the history of this guide. The OpenOffice.org core developers have collected detailed knowledge about UNO and the OpenOffice.org API. Sun Microsystems has commissioned two independent software developers and authors to write the Developer's Guide based on this material.
Through this documentation initiative, Sun Microsystems emphasizes its commitment to OpenOffice.org. Sun hopes to promote the adoption of OpenOffice.org for custom solutions and tries to broaden the market both for OpenOffice.org and StarOffice.
The guide has been written by OpenOffice.org 2.2 itself and was later converted to PDF and XHTML.The XHTML conversion especially shows the flexibility of the XML based file format of OpenOffice.org 2.2. It was made by an XSL transformation without a running office based directly on the documents. This XSL transformation is also available on OpenOffice.org. The integration with the reference documentation was done by the documentation tool and a Perl script which collects and provides the necessary information for the documentation tool.

Developer's Guide chapter quick-links:

Reader's guide
First Steps
Professional UNO
Writing UNO Components
Extensions
Advanced UNO
Office Development
Text Documents
Spreadsheet Documents
Drawing Documents and Presentation Documents
Charts
OpenOffice.org 2.2 Basic and Dialogs
Database Access
Forms
Universal Content Broker
Configuration Management
Office Bean
Accessibility
Scripting Framework
Graphical User Interfaces
Appendix A: OpenOffice.org 2.2 API-Design-Guidelines
Appendix B: IDL Documentation Guidelines
Appendix C: Universal Content Providers
Appendix D: UNOIDL Syntax Specification
Glossary

Copyright 2005 Sun Microsystems, Inc.