StarOffice 8 software is an easy to use office productivity suite with powerful word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database capabilities. Based on open source technology, OpenOffice.org, StarOffice 8 runs on Windows, Linux and Solaris operating systems. The suite is comprised of five key components: StarOffice Writer, Impress, Calc, Base and Draw.

StarOffice software provides excellent compatibility with Microsoft Office. StarOffice 8 software further improves import and export of Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, even password-protected MS Word and MS Excel files and presentations with complex animations, autoshapes and slide transitions. StarOffice 8 software also provides features that look more familiar to Microsoft Office users. The Format Paintbrush allows simple transfer of styles from one section of a document to another, and the Impress multi-pane user interface simplifies creation of high-impact presentations. If your good at programming you can use StarOffice as your tool in making your programs

Here are just a few examples of things you can do with StarOffice SDK:

• Add new functionality to StarOffice software. Add a new tool (such as a tool to perform a special calculation or to provide special formatting) to the StarOffice user interface, and develop the code to provide the tool’s functionality.
• Create an Add-In for StarOffice software. Create a tool (such as a statistical analysis tool) that can be plugged into the StarOffice spreadsheet application, allowing your users to perform complex analyses on the data they enter into their spreadsheets.
• Embed StarOffice software into your application. View and edit StarOffice documents from within your application’s user interface.
• Modify existing StarOffice documents or create new ones from your application. Create wizards or filters to convert or print existing StarOffice documents or to create new documents according to your needs.
• Create or modify StarOffice documents using data from a relational database management system (RDBMS). Access data from a RDBMS and place that data into specified locations in a new or existing StarOffice document.

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In a nutshell, the StarOffice SDK is a developer package that allows software to write applications that interact with local or remote StarOffice processes.

Component Technology
Staroffice SDK is based on a component technology called Universal Network objects (UNO). UNO provides a frameworks for cross-platforms and language-independent programming. With the StarOffice SDK, you can develop applications in several programming languages, including Java, C++, StarOffice Basic and any .Net language, for use on the Solaris Operating System and Linux and Windows platforms. UNO is the model, or environment, that allows network objects to communicate across programming languages and platform boundaries.

Communication Between Components
Communication between UNO components is defined by the UNO IDL. If you are familiar with CORBA, it should help to know that the UNO IDL is similar to the CORBA IDL; the UNO IDL is an abstract meta language that defines the interface that all components must support. To run in the UNO environment, a component must support the UNO interface.
TCP/IP is used as the medium for communication between UNO components. When communicating with a StarOffice process, an independent application is considered the client, and the StarOffice process is considered the server. StarOffice components can be implemented in any language supported by UNO, as long as they communicate with other components through their IDL interfaces.

Service Managers
UNO uses a factory concept to instantiate components in a target environment. This factory is called the service manager. The service manager maintains a database of registered components. Your application can instantiate and communicate with any component known by the service manager, no matter what language it was implemented in. Communication takes place through interface calls specified by the UNO IDL.

StarOffice Application Programming Interface
The StarOffice application programming interface (API) provides access to the functionality of the StarOffice software, allowing developers to extend the StarOffice software by adding their own new features and solutions. UNO components, and any other objects that need to specify functionality in the StarOffice software, access a StarOffice process using the StarOffice API.

The StarOffice SDK comes with a complete guide, the StarOffice SDK Developer’s Guide, which describes in detail both UNO and the StarOffice API. When you download and unpack the StarOffice SDK, you can link to the Developer’s Guide by pointing your browser to the index.html file at the root of the StarOffice SDK installation. For more information about the UNO environment and the StarOffice API, please see the complete documentation set that comes with the StarOffice SDK.

You can download the StarOffice SDK for the Solaris OS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows from Sun.com: StarOffice 8 Software Development Kit (SDK) Download Instructions.

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