Team:Redaktion/Nachrichten/KOffice Entwicklertreffen 08 (englisch)
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KOffice Sprint 2008
At the weekend of 8th and 9th November 2008 the KOffice Developer Meeting took place at KDAB office in Berlin, Germany. Though this event was only for the KOffice contributors, Franziska Tenzer (doilgheas) from kubuntu-de.org was invited by Thomas Zander and thus was attented the meeting on sunday.
KOffice is a free and open office suite belonging to the KDE project, but the last release is version 1.6 for KDE 3. Over 2 years of development at the new and polished version the release of 2.0 is in sight which will bring the own office solution to the KDE 4 desktop. In this article we report about the results of both days including the impressions Franziska Tenzer collected.
Saturday: Kickoff, Usability and Release
After the short kickoff talk held by Inge Wallin at 9am two groups splitted: the developers and the marketing team. Regarding to the developers the main focus was set to an analysis of the usability of the single KOffice applications which was supported by Ellen Reitmeyer, who is a member of the KDE usability team as well as openusability.org. Some aspects where under strong discussions ─ including strong agreement and disagreement from case to case ─ and a guideline was worked out in order to improve different issues. The appeareance of the single applications becomes more and more close making a consistent user experience possible, though the concentration is put on the core elements now.
Meanwhile the marketing team did a SWOT-analysis (Strenghts, Weaknesses, Chances, Threats) and prepared the release announcement. One of their discussions brought the release date and the applications, that will be part of the release, to topic. Due to some lack of developers not every question could be answered, though it became clear that KSpread will not be in a shape that can be published until the release, which is planed to be in february, 2009.
The release will include applications that are rock solid only, that means very robust and without crashes. In some cases some functionality is going to be taken out to provide this criteria; they are brought back for 2.1 eventually. An example is the table support in the word processor KWord; some features of the painting and image editing application Krita will be taken out, too, perhaps in the presentation application KPresenter also. However the vector graphics application Karbon and the project managing application KPlato are in a good shape by now. Unfortunately, Kexi (where large parts had to be rewritten), Kivio and as said KSpread are not likely to be released with KOffice 2.0.
Sunday: Web, Tests and The End
This day was initiated by a talk from Alexandra Leise, who communicatd the strategic concept for the KOffice website. It shall have a stronger focus to the community, maybe even as a [666:en(Vorbild)] for KDE. To achieve the goal, social webservices can be integrated ((micro-)blogs, networks, commits and likes) as one of the ideas was. Surprisingly, Jaroslaw showed a professinal and wiki-based website for Kexi, which will be used as staring point, presumably. Furthermore Alexandra presented a worked out vision for the KOffice project.
The marketing discussion was followed by a talk from Thomas Zander about software testing. He dealt with testing setters and getters, methods as well as units in special. That was continued with further hacking sessions and very technical discussions, including krita as main topic regarding its templates, as well as appearance and usability of the user inteface.
The meeting was valued as positive and productive. Still there are many things to do, nevertheless the contributors enjoy working on KOffice and have a bright view of the feature. They are proud of KOffice`s architecture, which is able to make extraordinary things, in special. However, every new potential contributor is most welcome.
About the code base
The source of KOffice and the single applications is highly modular and designed under the promise to make different parts in different programs, like the integration of Krita in a word processor, spreadsheed and presentation application. The clean and well designed code is thus not only an ideal starting pont for individual developers to add custom features to KOffice, but espacially for companies, which have very special requirements for an office suite. The provided architecutre empossibles [666 right word?] to concentrate fully to the new values without concerning the basic offices elements.
