OpenOffice.org API or LibreOffice API? - openoffice.org

Which API should I use? Which one is more promising? My main goal is to generate ODF documents. It's important for me to support ODF 1.2. And I want to use C++ and CLI bingings.

I use OpenOffice API a lot in an application of me. I made some tests with LibreOffice too and there are some (as far as i see undocumented and unwanted!) differences allready! (OO 3.2 against LO 3.4 and 3.5) Not much but here and there teh LO-Api behaves different from the OO-Api even in the same functionality. This is not important if you only deal with one of them, but it is important when you have to be sure that your App runs with OO and LO.

There is nearly no difference between the two APIs ATM. At least before Libreoffice 4.0 ( which is only in planning with no specific date ) there might be some long necessary API clean-ups. All in all they should be even c++ binary compatible.
Right now you should be able to use the same extensions/code to access both Libreoffice and Openoffice. You should only be careful with all interfaces marked as LibO 3.4 or 3.5 from http://api.libreoffice.org/

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SwaggerDiff for Swagger Version 3

I recently came across this little tool: Swagger-diff
It compares two APIs which are currently running and then shows changes you made from old version to new version. Sadly this only works for Swagger 1.x and 2.0.
Does anyone knows a tool with the same functionality but works with Swagger 3.0?
Regards,
Hannes
Sometime back, I was also challenged with the same issue.
I was not able to find anything readymade open-source online.
But digging all the swagger-diff implementations a little bit deeper, I found that all of them work on this swagger-parser library.
Apart from the one you mentioned, there is one implementation in ruby and another one in node. All of them work on the same concept of the swagger-parser.
Swagger 3 works on yml instead of JSON format, so the above libraries will fail to parse the contracts. So, you need to modify the swagger-diif library to convert the yml to JSON format before parsing. Everything else remains the same.

php 5.3 framework / class / functions for php 5.2

I have a website made for php 5.3 that uses a lot of features included in php 5.3.
My web server (wich is a share host) uses php 5.2 and the company doesn't support php 5.3.
So I want to know if there is a php framework, class, bunch of functions or anything I can use to "simulate" php 5.3 on a php 5.2 server?
If so, what is the best one and where can I find it?
You could probably get 80% there, writing workarounds for some of what is introduced in PHP 5.3. However, there are a lot of things introduced at the language level that simply can't be emulated using PHP 5.2.
If you are really committed to your host, your best chance would be to evaluate exactly which features of PHP 5.3 your existing code is using, and then determine if those things fall within the scope of what you could find workarounds for. Alternatively, you could simply rewrite any code that is using PHP 5.3 features so that the would behave properly under 5.2. Either way, that's probably going to be a lot of work with not a significant amount of benefit (assuming changing hosts is an option).
So two options:
If this is a situation where the code must run on this host (say it was a school project hosted on school servers, or similarly a company project on company servers), I think your best bet is going to be refactoring your code to run on PHP 5.2.
If you can change hosts, I would recommend that as your best option.
I don't think you can. PHP 5.3 adds new options to the language that are not even close to being backwards compatible with PHP 5.2

MonoTouch Migration Analyser

Is there any migration analysers available for MonoTouch ?
I have seen one for Mono, but not for MonoTouch.
Short answer: No, there is none at the moment.
Long answer
The situation is a bit different from Mono. In general you test a complete and compiled (against a specific version of the framework) .NET application with MoMA, to get a report of what pieces are missing (or incomplete) in Mono that could affect the execution of your application on other platforms (e.g. OSX and Linux).
Testing a complete applications for MonoTouch would reports tons of issues - since the UI toolkit is totally different. E.g. anything about System.Windows.Forms, WPF... would always missing.
However if your assemblies are already split into (something like) an MVC design it would be possible to test some (the non-UI parts) of them against definitions based on the MonoTouch base class library.
Finally if someone has an immediate need (or looking for a nice project) MoMA is available as open source and the evaluation versions of MonoTouch contains all the assemblies needed to build the definitions files. A bit of extra filtering could make this into a very nice tool.
Alternative
You can see a list of the assemblies that are part of MonoTouch and some platform restrictions (compared to .NET) you should be aware.

Firefox extension: native code execution?

Is it possible to write an extension that runs native, platform-dependent code? I'm an extension-newbie (what a phrase!) :), can you please point me towards good material on this subject? (good keywords to feed to Google are enough)
(I would like to put a GtkMenu in Firefox)
Edit:
I started checking out the Gecko SDK, and it's a rather big subject, and I'm not sure this is what I want.
I'd be happy with a friendly manual (which is not a raw reference, but rather some kind of tutorial on how to make extensions that utilize XPCOM (if that is the way). Good keywords are still appreciated.
Check out the Gecko SDK.
You can use it make portable C++ native code firefox extensions which I believe are XPCOM objects with JavaScript wrappers in the .xpm zip file.
I haven't tried it, but you can go the usual route and write the plugin, I mean extension, in javascript also.
Native Client doesn't quite offer the breadths of API firefox extensions offer, but it's still well worth checking out for your purposes IMHO.
Yes, you can. Witness the Cooliris extension, that makes (heavy) use of your 3D graphics card, and is Windows specific.

Cross-platform development - Delphi 2011: How to made a Windows-tied library cross-platform?

As perhaps you know already, most probably the next version of Delphi will be cross-platform. Also, here are some polls on the matter.
While writing a cross-compiler isn't a thing which interests us very much now, porting a library which was/is Windows-tied to multiple platforms, certainly does.
You can think, for example at VCL (Delphi's standard library). While it was designed for Windows only, it has value in it, and, of course, there are huge codebases which depend on it.
The question is:
Which would be the best approach to made an application / library cross-platform aware ensuring a smooth conversion / upgrade path (as much as possible of course)?
I stress it again, we are not interested which is the best way to do cross-platform development only (there were questions on this theme). We are interested also in yet another requirement: The old code base / installations management.
PS: Experiences and/or methodologies from similar situations with other languages (eg. C/C++) which are regarded as standard practices are welcomed.
Thanks in advance.
Visual component developer's perspective:
Add levels of functionality to your code, so as to be able to add another platform without changing the "Core" of the component.
The compiler hopefully will have a platform switch. (Preferable more than one, working in conjunction with each other. ex. Windows/ARM, Windows/386, OSX/Cacao/386, Linux/Gnome/386).
The Layout structure might look something like this.
ComponentJ.pas
Linux\ComponentJ.pas
Linux\Gnome\ComponentJ.pas
Linux\KDE\ComponentJ.pas
OSX\ComponentJ.pas
386\ComponentJ.pas
ARM\ComponentJ.pas
As an Application Developer:
I'll start by moving all WIN API calls in my code into a group of libraries in a Windows directory as to be able to IFDEF it at library level and translate it into another platform I'd like to support as soon as the compiler becomes available, but only as I come across them.)
This will also add the possibility to add adapters easier for the new platforms.
It in any case is good practice to remove possible dependencies into a central place.
IMHO you can't build a xplatform Delphi and ensure a smooth transition for current VCL applications. It won't work. VCL was (luckily, because it allowed for great applications) designed with Windows in mind, and trying to design a compatible library working on a different platform would just mean longer development cycles and lots of compromises. The outcome will be a library noone would wish to use. Look at what happened to VCL.NET: it was the wrong choice. And it was working on the same OS!
We know that targeting non-Windows platform with native applications needs a native GUI library. We don't care about creating a GUI from scratch, for our application it's the way to go, we don't need Windows GUIs with all their standards under a different OS using different standards - we need to be able to code a fully native GUI for the target OS.
Other applications may survive a GUI porting, but in the long run you don't get a real xplatform tool - you get a tool that may compile for other platforms but brings one platform paradigms to others - and it will also be not welcome by "native" developers on other platforms. If you're a Linux or Mac developer, why should you learn how to work with a library that carries its Windows inheritance to your platform? You'd find it a pain in the ass. If Embarcadero wants to sell XDelphi outside actual developers base, it has to offer much more than a new CLX.
I will pull from some ancient experience in making a code base cross compilable between windows and dos (Delphi 1/Turbo Pascal 7). The rule of thumb was to separate code into multiple units. Try to code WITHOUT using windows, messages or any visual components. If you find you need to make a call to one of these, then place that call in another unit and write a proxy (abstract class that you descend from works well) to dispatch the calls through. When a cross compatible version is released, all that you should have to do is code the other side of the proxy for the new target.
If you're designing a form based system, then try to stick with as many of the standard components as possible. NEVER implement any "business" rules directly in an event, instead place them in another unit and call into the other unit to perform the logic.
Now, there will definitely be changes required to get your final project cross compatible, but by following these simple patterns you should be able to greatly reduce the amount of work it will take.
Experience so far has shown that the best way to get a Delphi app compatible with future versions is to stick to pure Delphi components, and use nothing third party. Such an app will probably suck, but that's how it seems to me. I use lots of third party components, and the apps are great and successful. But the chances of them moving to this future too are not certain, and that may cause problems with such changes, but I'd rather have a great app now and have the problem than have a poor app now and not need to worry about it.
Compromises should not be done too much to make VCL compatible with Linux and Mac. Windows is VCL's root. I'll prefer a new and very clean GUI framework, even though without any backward compatibility. Make VCL fatter and fatter isn't a good idea!
make a cross-platform Pascal compiler
make a cross-platform RTL
put the QT on top
Well, look at freepascal and lazarus
I don't get it. All .NET looks the same to me providing we don't use any third party.
Delphi using standard control is already fully functional but your app would look
like thousands of others.
I think Embar should go for PDA, IPhone, Andriod as Windows desktop already eat about
98% of the market.
Mac is expensive and Linux is no cost at all. No use to go for Mac and Linux. Not worth
the investment.
Well, aside the things said - thanks all - I do think that there we need some additional things:
we need tooling to do the necessary conversions
we need tooling to help us in programming against a (some form of) MVC pattern
Simply pick the latest 4.6 QT and add good integration betwen the Pascal and the QT library.
They have done it before (in the Kylix times). The QT is such powerfull these days.
I believe that QT is even better then VCL and at least 10 times more frequently updated and fixed.
So the plan is simple:
make a cross-platform Pascal compiler
make a cross-platform RTL
put the QT on top
and you will have a first-class natively looking applications on all platforms.
My opinion:
Make cross platform compiler (OS x/Linux/ embedded solutions?/ symbian?). Maybe add ability to compile/convert pascal code into portable c/c++ code to build then on embedded platforms.
RTL have to be separated into cross-platform layer and native layer (as for JCL).
Add new core components for cross-platform compatibility and native components for each supported platform (QT for ex)
Add translation utilities to create/convert between platform's components, for ex: to convert pure windows form into mac os x cocoa's form.
All windows hierarchy of components have to be only upgraded to support x64 with maximum backward compatibility. All cross-platform component have to be in parallel hierarchy.
Next version of cross platform solution can be refactored and can include migration/convertion utility. Due to minimum codebase of cross-platform solutions, hierarchy and classes for cross platform can be heavily changed from version to version to achieve best architecture.
sorry for my English - not a native language (Russian is)!
Make C/C++/Delphi compilers that targets OSX/Linux
Make C/C++ compiler that can be Boosted
Write new VCL-Presentation Foundation (VGScene/WPF alike)
it should not be backward compatibile! Delphi IDE should be
written with such VCL-PF
Component Library should stay as it is (but with improved Data-Binding)
Only provide VCL 64-bit for Win64
Is this a problem?

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