In the past, applications such as WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 tried to be do-all be-all monoliths of immense size and complexity. WordPerfect had its own spreadsheet features, 1-2-3 had its own word-processing features, both tried to be desktop publishers and databases too. Each had their own spellchecking modules, drawing modules, add-ons, plug-ins and so on.

But if you wanted the spreadsheet power of 1-2-3 in your WordPerfect documents, or the word processing power of WordPerfect in your 1-2-3 documents, you either had to make do without or mess around with a lot of cutting and pasting, importing and other awkward methods that never actually gave you the results you wanted. Plus, when switching from one application to another you had to relearn a whole new set of commands just to do the same thing. The keystrokes for moving back and forth through text were different in both programs, not to mention the rest of the user interface.

OpenDoc was invented to solve this and quite a few other problems. OpenDoc is a way of building compound documents with collections of small, portable components called Parts. These parts reside in Containers, and you can put any type of part into any kind of container. Learn only one text-editing part and you can put it into any document container you please. The same goes for spreadsheet parts, or graphics parts, spellchecking parts and so on.

What makes this idea really powerful is that even though you may have been given a document originally written with, say MegaSoft's word processing part, you can choose to edit it with the ClearLook part that you're more used to. As long as the data type is the same, it can be worked on with any part designed to edit that particular type. This way you know you can always edit compound documents with your favorite tools, rather than the ones you're forced to use.

Bundled with Warp 4.0 (and freely downloadable from IBM's Club OpenDoc if you still have Warp 3) is OpenDoc 1.0, complete with a basic set of containers and parts for you to get started with. These include a basic Page Layout container, a Text part, 2D Graphics part, Audio part, Image part and Video part. These are hidden in the OpenDoc folder in the Utilities folder of the Programs Folder upon a default install of Warp 4.

To create new documents and parts, you simply open the OpenDoc Templates folder and drag one of the templates into either a Desktop folder or an OpenDoc container. We started a document (GIF, 30k) this way, first creating a new Page Layout container and then dragging a Text Part from the template into the open document. This created a resizeable Text Part frame in the Page Layout container that we could enter text into, change formatting and more. What we found even more interesting is that we could also drag a Text Part from the template into a regular folder and create a separate file -- just of that one text part.

This Text Part could then be opened in its own window where we could enter text and formatting, save and close, then drag-and-drop the file into the Page Layout container. One begins to imagine how this could be used at a newspaper or magazine, where individual journalists write their articles in a Text Part, then mail that file to their editor who then drag-n-drops it into the master layout.

Also in the OpenDoc folder is a Part Editor Preferences applet. This is a properties notebook which allows you to select which part you want to use for each registered data type. Thus whenever you open a document on your machine you always know what parts will be used for each kind of data, be it text, tables, 2D graphics, images or whatever. At this time we didn't have much choice here since the OpenDoc that ships with Warp 4 only comes with a basic minimum of parts.

Performance and Integration

Integration is superb, however. Not only can parts be edited in place within a document as well as on their own, but the whole OpenDoc kit feels like a real part of the Workplace Shell. Properties notebooks look just the same as regular WPS notebooks, complete with 'File' and 'Icon' tabs. Plus you can open any document in the standard three views (Icon, Tree and Details) and see what parts are nested within that document, giving you the power to edit, delete or move them individually just like regular WPS objects. This owes to the fact that OpenDoc uses SOM (System Object Model) as its underlying object technology, the same technology the Workplace Shell was built on.

Third Party Support

OpenDoc has the support of several major companies including IBM, Apple, Borland, Hewlett Packard and more. Plus at IBM's Club OpenDoc we were able to download a Beta version of TrueSpectra's drawing part. If you've played with the Photo>Graphics demo that came in the Warp 4 Application Sampler CD you'll know what the TrueSpectra engine is like. In our opinion this goes a long way to making OpenDoc genuinely useful for the average user right off the bat.

Sundial Systems has also announced support for OpenDoc in upcoming versions of their Mesa/2 spreadsheet and ClearLook word processor. The idea of embedding TrueSpectra drawings into Mesa/2 spreadsheets certainly has appeal to us, as does the ability to use Mesa's power within ClearLook.

We consider OpenDoc to be a very powerful, simple technology with real and far-reaching benefits. Its major competitor is Microsoft's OLE, a platform dependant, limited and poorly designed technology that has considerably more third party support. But OpenDoc has been ported to several major platforms so far (OS/2, Windows, AIX and Mac) and promises to be interoperable with OLE, allowing developers to take advantage of the broader power in OpenDoc while still retaining support for the more popular OLE. We think it's still to early to tell what kind of impact this will have on the developer community and if OpenDoc will become a practical solution for us all.

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