Re: Coupling of Octave with Open Office

[Horst Salzwedel]

Hi,

I embedded my answers after your suggestions and questions below:

Soren Hauberg wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Sounds like an interesting project.
>
> son, 08 03 2009 kl. 04:11 -0700, skrev Horst Salzwedel:
> > For this integration we only had to add a few functions to Octave to support
> > the Open Document standard and replaced to input function of octave.
>
> Does that mean you have functions that allow you to read spreadsheet
> data into Octave?
Last year we developed versions of Octave load and save to save Octave 
Data in the Open Document format of OpenOffice Calc and again load those 
data in Octave. Now we went the next step of developing an interface 
that make Octave look like another feature of OpenOffice.org, like Calc, 
Draw, Write, ... using the mechanisms of OpenOffice.org for additions to 
the program. For the GUI we used the OpenOffice.org features of writing 
GUIs.
> I while back there was a discussion on this list about creating an
> interface for Octave that external applications could use. The main
> focus was on having an API that external editors could use. I have some
> code for using D-BUS to communicate with Octave from exteral
> applications. Perhaps such an interface is all you would need?
We discussed an approach like your D-BUS as a solution and decided on 
using the coupling mechanisms build into OpenOffice.org. The reason is 
we want to be able to make it possible to use Octave programming 
features for all components of OO, program controlled Draw pages, 
program controlled interactive Impress slides that make it feasible to 
give presentations that itselve meet criteria of scientific research 
and being repeatable thru the Octave model.
> > Integrating Octave into OpenOffice would make it instantly available to the
> > 260 Million users of OpenOffice.
>
> Are you talking about creating a plugin for OpenOffice.org that contains
> Octave, or are you pushing to see Octave integrated into the 'core' of
> OpenOffice.org?
Our goal is to combine the features of OO and Octave in a way that every 
child in School, every Student and every Teacher in Schools or 
Universities can use it like any other Office feature for Math, Physics, 
Engineering and make it feasible to introduce model based approaches in 
our educational system, in order to cope with and understand the 
increasing complexity of our technology.
> It might be worth mentioning that the spreadsheet 'gnumeric' is
> embedding R. That way they didn't have to do a lot of the statistical
> stuff themselves. Perhaps they have some relevant experiences?
Thanks, we are going to take a look at this.
> Soren

Horst