Rod Engelsman wrote:
Just to play devil's advocate here... So the design of MSO with Word,
Excel, Powerpoint, Frontpage, and Outlook being separate programs that
"play nice" with each other is actually a better design than the
monolithic OOo?
To me, it depends on whether you're actually going to re-use components
or just lumping code together. I don't know anything about Frontpage so
I'll skip it. I think that keeping Outlook separate is a good idea. If
you just had Word and Excel, and based on the understanding that those
products don't have much code to share (e.g. little vector graphics
ability) I'd also say "keep them separate". Now, in the case of Writer,
it really does have more vector graphics features. And when you add
Impress, you get a lot of vector graphics. So now you have a fair bit of
code that can reasonably be shared. And sharing code reduces
duplication. Furthermore, sharing that code, allows you get a vector
graphics app with a relatively modest effort. In particular, Impress and
Draw have almost all of their codebase in common. So, we're not really
adding much code by adding Draw.
So... back to your question. Just lumping Word, Excel and Outlook as one
program would be a really bad idea. But if you could significantly
reduce the code size by having them share components that they have in
common, that would be a good idea. And this is what OOo does.
I hope that helps.
Disclaimer: This conversation has gone way out of my area of knowledge.
I'm half-guessing based on my "impression" of what these programs have.
Cheers,
Daniel.
