OpenDoc

OpenDoc was a collaborative effort between Apple Computer, IBM, WordPerfect Corp. (later Novell), Sun Microsystems, XSoft and Taligent to create a vendor independent, open standard for compound documents.

Its development was later taken over by a company called Component Integration Laboratories (CI Labs) that was owned by Apple, IBM and Justsystem. For a time CIL marketed an OpenDoc/CORBA solution for Java under the Live Objects brand. The lack of sales meant that CI Labs was dissolved in 1998 and there was talk about open sourcing the code for OpenDoc and other CI Labs products but for legal reasons that never happened.

Technology
Basically an OpenDoc compound document is comprised of modules known as "Parts" that each have its own control program that is referred to as an "Editor". An OpenDoc Part can be anything a normal application would offer, eg a spreadsheet Part, a text Part, a database Part and so on, each Part can not only coexist with other parts in the compound document but they can also nest inside each other. When you open a compound document, you are effectively using a collection of Editors rather than a single program.

If no other storage format is requested or specified by the Editor the data is stored in a meta-format called Bento, that gives each Editor or Part a storage object of its own called "Storage Unit" that contains a list of properties inside it making it look like a file directory to the end user, in turn each Storage Unit is contained inside a list of SU's called Draft but in addition to operating as a sort of an index for Storage units contained inside the handles the householding of file reads and writes, but changes to a Storage Unit are not saved wholesale by a Draft but rather only the changes at each save, which in turn opens up the possibility of an almost infinite undo/redo operations.

OpenDoc received quite a bit of criticism for being overly complex for what it does. After the discontinuation of OS/2, IBM promised to open source the whole thing but that never happened, according to rumours Apple prevented them from doing so.

But there is another aspect to a compound document system and that is the possibility of collaborative editing, OpenDoc supports more that one person "owning" each document so that more than one person can work on each document at a time if the application supports it, this is more or less inherent with the external material embedded into another doucement nature of a compound document. But more interestingly even if the application in question does not support it directly more than one person can work on the same document as long as they are not working inside the same container, e.g. a graphics designer can continue to work on the graphics inside one container while the author of the text or code can carry on working inside his container.
 * Collaborative editing

While we do have collaborative document systems today with sundry web based services they all require access to a centralised and specialised document servers while OpenDoc and similar systems allow this by default and without the need for external mechanisms of any kind.

History
While OpenDoc is sometimes presented as an answer to Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technologies it actually has a history predating Microsoft's introduction of OLE and the rather weak COM model, OpenDoc's ancestry lies with the Xerox Star system which offered a rudimentary compound document system, but a number of the original OpenDoc team at Apple had worked for Xerox on the Star prior to joining Apple. What spurred them into action was the huge interest generated by the extensible objects available for the Oberon operating system and the compound documents that went with that idea, those two technologies were a hot topic in the early nineties.

The research into the Oberon extensible/compound document system eventually resulted in the Oberon/F system later commercialised under the BlackBox Oberon name, but further development of that system was hampered when Microsoft poached more or less the entire BlackBox development team from Oberon Microsystems. Noticeably the BlackBox system is easier to use and develop for, much simpler and faster than OpenDoc if not as language independent.

Developer Frameworks

 * Apple OpenDoc
 * Novell version of OpenDoc (Contains early version of SOM for Windows)
 * IBM Windows OpenDoc. With sources OpenDoc, Bento and IBM’s sample Parts. - OD124WIN.ZIP
 * IBM AIX OpenDoc. For AIX 4.1 - Relies on SOMTK SDK (not included) - OpenDoc.tar.Z.
 * IBM OpenDoc for OS/2

Developer Tools

 * IBM PartMeister

Books

 * Feiler: Essential OpenDoc – Addison-Wesley 1996, ISBN 0-201-47958-3
 * Bart Jacob, Henri Jubin: Part Development for OpenDoc - Prentice Hall 1997, ISBN 0-13-263286-1

Articles

 * Kurt Piersol: A Close up of OpenDoc - from Byte Magazine (Mar 1994)
 * Atze Dijkstra: OpenDoc Presentation - (Mar 1998)
 * R. Tycast: OpenDoc Technology: Basic Concepts - (Mar 1994)
 * Elizabeth Ann Dykstra-Erickson; Dave Curbow: Role of User Studies in Design of OpenDoc®
 * Ralph M. Pipitone: OpenDoc and Human-Computer Interaction - Personal Systems Magazine, Sep/Oct 1995
 * Scott Tooker and Rodney Cole: Using OpenDoc to create low-cost physics simulation tools for secondary and higher education - (Nov 1996)
 * Elizabeth Dykstra-Erickson, Dave Curbow, Geoff Schuller and Kurt Piersol:Collaborative Aspects of OpenDoc
 * Dave Curbow: Lessons learned from OpenDoc
 * Elizabeth Dykstra-Erickson; Dave Curbow: Designing the OpenDoc® Human Interface


 * Bento
 * Kirk Searls: Bento Technology (Mar 1994)
 * Bento Brief - CILabs (Sep 1995)
 * Bento Design Overview - CILabs (1995)
 * Matt Timmermans: SGML and OpenDoc - Bento (Sep 1995)


 * Open Scripting Architecture (OSA)
 * Robert Tycast: Open Scripting Architecture: Scripting for the Masses


 * More Articles
 * OpenDoc Glossary (Jun 1994)
 * OpenDoc vs. OLE 2.0. Superior by Design. A Developer's View (Jan 1994)
 * IBM: Side by Side Comparison - OpenDoc vs. OLE2 (Nov 1993)
 * Tycast: OpenDoc: An Idea Whose Time has Come! (Nov 1993)
 * Tantek Çelik; Dave Curbow: Working With OpenDoc Part Kinds


 * Tycast: Writing OpenDoc Part Handlers: Hello World (Jan 1995)
 * Tycast: Hello World: Part II, OpenDoc Views and Presentation Types (Apr 1995)
 * Tycast: Understanding How OpenDoc "Ticks" Using Trace and Debug Tools (Aug 1995)
 * Leigh Williamson: OpenDoc for AIX (Apr 1996)
 * Gregg Williams: OpenDoc and Java Beans (1997)
 * Bento and OpenDoc by David McCusker (Coments about IronDoc) (2000)


 * Related patents
 * Dave Curbow: Computer-human interface system which manipulates parts between a desktop and a document.
 * Dave Curbow et al: Computer-human interface system for compound documents
 * Dave Curbow et al: System for automatically embedding or incorporating contents added to a document


 * Marketing material
 * CI Lab: Java and OpenDoc Integration Roadmap (1996)

Software based on OpenDoc

 * Lotus Components
 * WebPainter for OpenDoc
 * Mesa 2 - Spreadsheet

Links

 * Greg Maletic - 1995 Apple Product Marketing Manager for OpenDoc.


 * Related projects
 * DocShell
 * IronDoc (Bento Replacement) - archived