On their excellent presentation Tuesday afternoon, Jurgen Schmidt and Colm Smyth revealed (to me at least) that StarOffice has a Java programming API. How cool is that! This open up a number of intriguing possibilities.

• Controlling StarOffice programmatically(this could take care of writing “I will not talk in class” 100 times very nicely).

• Embedding StarOffice in a Java application as an engine to view and edit rich text.

• Integrating live services (LDAP, database queries, Web service, addressbook) into documents.

• Using the StarOffice bean as a formatting gateway. Besides it's native XML format, StarOffice can output HTML, PDF, RTF, Flash, SVG and a variety of Microsoft Word formats.

Of course, to be fair, the Other Guys' office suite has been programmable for a long time, as the proliferation of Word macro viruses attests. For that matter StarOffice, too, has a StarBasic scripting language. But as someone who has done a bit of VBA programming, I can tell you it isn't pretty. Programming an office suite in a real, robust language like Java is a refreshing change.

In the present version of StarOffice, ver.6, the API is complete but undocumented. To use it, go to http://api.openoffice.org/ and download the SDK, which contains the Developer's Guide and JavaDocs for the API. The Developer's Guide has a number of useful examples. The next version of StarOffice will come with the SDK on a separate CD.

All of this is possible in OpenOffice as well. StarOffice's open source twin is virtually identical except for a few features that contain third-party proprietary code (such as the phonetic spell checker). And, my MacFriends tell me, StarOffice 1.01 runs very nicely on the Mac in Apple's X11 beta, so it is truly cross-platform.