Re: Coupling of Octave with Open Office

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Horst Salzwedel
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> the main software which children in school, students at universities and
> engineers are using is Office. In office they are using the spreadsheet to
> do calculations for their work.
>
> Spreadsheets are data view programs that hide the model/algorithm and are
> ill suited to support our model based thinking, research and engineering.
>
> Octave is a great SW system that is easy to use and mathematical models and
> algorithms are easy to implement. However, only relatively few have it on
> their computers.
>
> We are trying to make model based an analysis capabilities available to all
> students and engineers and have developed an interface that integrates
> Octave into the open source Office: OpenOffice (OO). We developed a
> graphical interface (using some features of an earlier CtrlC derivative,
> SatLab) for octave with the OO graphical environment, thereby trying to
> overcome some of the limitations of Matlab. It is now e.g. possible to have
> a model in Octave, the parameters in a spread sheet, and attach the
> parameters in the spreadsheet to a slider. By moving the slider, the event
> loop of the spreadsheet triggers the reexecution in octave and you can
> observe how the octave graph is changing. This is really great for doing
> trade offs and particularly for teaching. I think what our 13 year old
> learned in 8 weeks in Middle School in Palo Alto about linear equations, can
> now be taught in 1 day.
>
> Having Octave in OpenOffice would also make it possible to do model based
> approaches for all the other OpenOffice functionality and meake it really
> the tool of choice for teaching, research and engineering.
>
> 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.
>
> Integrating Octave into OpenOffice would make it instantly available to the
> 260 Million users of OpenOffice.
>
> I have talked with the OpenOffice development team. They are very interested
> in this and invited us to present this to them.
>
> Before I talk with them and pursue this further, I would like to get your
> opinion about this.
>
> I have a diploma thesis (in German) of my student Tino Jungebloud, which
> describes the interface. I uploaded this Thesis.
> http://www.nabble.com/file/p22396824/Diplomarbeit-jungebloud-2009-02-09-0004.pdf
> Diplomarbeit-jungebloud-2009-02-09-0004.pdf
>
> Horst
>

It sounds very interesting indeed. Once again I regret my German is so poor :)
I have tinkered with Octave - OpenOffice communication (via UNO)
myself, but I haven't got remotely this far. Is this work going to be
released as free software?
I see the thesis describes both Octave embedded in OpenOffice as well
as OO used from Octave. That seem quite versatile. It also seems that
it was developed against Octave 3.0.x series. Mayeb some work will be
necessary to update the code to work with the upcoming 3.2.x series -
parts of API have changed. Stabilizing the Octave API is something
that some of us hope to happen after 3.2.x.
In any case I'll be quite interested in helping with this integration.

regards

-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert & GNU Octave developer
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz