Exemplars of large document-centric applications with COM/XPCOM/.NET interfaces.
- by Warren P
I am looking for exemplars (design examples) showing the use of interfaces (aka 'protocols' for you smalltalkers) to design a document management architecture in a large Word Processor, Spreadsheet, vector graphic or publishing package, or office-productivity (non-database) application with support for as many of the following as possible:
any open source project, will be ideal, and language of implementation is unimportant since I am looking for design examples, however an object oriented language with support for "interfaces" is a must. I know at least a dozen languages, and I'm willing to study any application's source.
use of "interface" could loosely be applied to either XPCOM or COM interfaces, or .NET interfaces, or even the use of pure-virtual (virtual+abstract) base-classes for OOP languages that lack the ability to declare an interface distinct from a class.
I am mostly looking for a robust, thorough and flexible implementation for a document, IDocument, various document views (IDocumentView), and whatever operations make sense in that case.
I am particular interested in cases where the product in question is a real-world product. For example, if anybody familiar with OpenOffice can tell me if the code contains a good sample design.
I am looking for design documentation that outlines the design of the interfaces for such an application. So for example, if the openoffice spreadsheet has such an interface design, then that might be the best case, because it is a widely used real-world design, with millions of users, rather than a textbook example, which is minimal, and contrived.
I know that the Mozilla platform uses XPCOM, and its design is heavily "interface" oriented, but I am looking more for a "word processor" or "spreadsheet" type of document design, rather than a web-browser.
I am particularly interested in the interfaces used to access to data and meta-data such as markup (attributes like bold, and italics, and font size), and the ability to search and look up named entities within a document.
