As many of the readers may wonder what is the uno-skeletonmaker, I will start with a short explanation of its use. The uno-skeletonmaker is a command line tool provided in the OpenOffice.org SDK which generates a skeleton of code for the implementation of an UNO IDL service specification. This tool can generate either C++ or Java. The uno-skeletonmaker is mainly used in the Eclipse and NetBeans integrations for OpenOffice.org.

Why do I would like to improve the uno-skeletonmaker?

In fact the code generated by this tool is not really acceptable for a OpenOffice.org extensions beginner developer. For example, the methods generated for an interface attributes in Java simply does nothing and there is no TODO comment to inform the developer that something has to be written there. What could be great has been started in the C++ code generation: these methods have a default body using a private member. The problem with the C++ generated code is that the member is not defined.

By talking with Noel Power at the Go-OOCon in Prague, we found interesting to improve (may be redevelop) the uno-skeletonmaker for it to be able to manage code style definitions. The need is that every coder or enterprise has its own code style and would like to have it applied by the uno-skeletonmaker. An other interesting point of making the uno-skeletonmaker templateable would be to have to ability to add new languages more easily (e.g. Python).

I've started hacking the uno-skeletonmaker to fix the attributes methods generation problems and I will certainly add the support of singletons code generation. However, I won't make the uno-skeletonmaker templateable during the nights because its quite a long job. If anyone wants to do it, feel free to propose yourself on the dev AT api mailing list: its a quite small piece of code with really few dependencies.