Apache OpenOffice Software Development Kit (SDK)

The Apache OpenOffice Software Development Kit (SDK) is an add-on for OpenOffice. It provides the the necessary tools and documentation for programming the OpenOffice APIs and creating your own extensions (UNO components) for OpenOffice. The SDK will accompany new releases of OpenOffice.

The detailed developer documentation has been moved into the wiki for easier maintenance and better community collaboration. Please see the Developer's Guide online. This comprehensive guide (wiki book) provides, in more than 900 wiki pages, a detailed description of the OpenOffice API concepts, the OpenOffice UNO component model and how to use the API in the context of the different application areas. At the close of each chapter, there is at least one example that shows how to use the API.

Interested developers should start using this SDK for their implementations. Feedback is welcome via email on dev@api.openoffice.org, and bugs should be reported as an IssueZilla task. All requests for enhancement and new features will be collected and go into the planning of future versions of the SDK.

SDK Download

Customize or extend your office installation with new functionality or simplify your daily work by creating automated tasks. Test it and download the SDK to find out the power of Apache OpenOffice and its programmability features.

Features

• detailed developer documentation online, (Developer's Guide)
  • easier maintenance
  • on demand PDF creation. It is possible to create a PDF from small parts only or from the whole wiki book
• IDL reference with cross references to the Developer's Guide and vice versa.
• C/C++ and Java UNO reference documentation.
• development tools
• examples in Java, C++, OpenOffice Basic
• minimal build environment for the examples
• run targets in the makefiles for easy running the examples
• use of the new deployment tool to integrate new components or Basic libraries in an existing office installation.

Changes with the OpenOffice.org 3.0 SDK

The initial plan was to integrate the SDK as an optional part in the office installation directly. In the last minute we detected a high increase of the build time (packaging) because of the huge amount of files. That was not accpetable and we changed the initial plan. The SDK is still available as separate download.

Because of this last minute change the installation especially under windows is not perfect. The setup suggests to install the SDK under the new base layer which is recommneded. Otherwise the configuration works not properly. This will change in the future.

Anyway the installation differs on the different platforms. On Mac OSX the SDK is completely separated because of the strcuture with the application bundle. On Windows and the other UNIX platforms the SDK is installed as a sub directory in the new base layer (introduced in OpenOffice.org 3.0) and is shared between different installations based on the same base layer.

• Windows: c:/Program Files/OpenOffice.org/Basis 3.0/sdk
• Mac OSX: /<somewhere>/OpenOffice.org3.0_SDK
• Linux|Solaris (Unix general): /opt/openoffice.org/basis3.0/sdk.

Building the SDK

All people who want to build a SDK from scratch should take account of the SDK build guide.

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Last update: 11-Aug-2008