OpenDoc

OpenDoc was a multi-platform software componentry framework standard for compound documents, inspired by the Xerox Star system and intended as an alternative to Microsoft's object linking and embedding (OLE).

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Sometimes, people mistakenly refer to OpenDocument (short for the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications) as OpenDoc.

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The basic idea of OpenDoc was to create small single-purpose reusable components responsible for a specific task, such as text editing, bitmap editing or browsing an FTP server. OpenDoc provided a framework in which these editors could run together, and provided a document format for storing the data being generated by each component. These documents could then be opened on other machines, where the OpenDoc frameworks would substitute suitable editors for each part, even if they were from different vendors.

Software componentry: Software componentry is a field of study within software engineering. It builds on prior theories of software objects, software architectures, software frameworks and software design patterns, and the extensive theory of object-oriented programming and object-oriented design of all these. It claim...

Compound document: In computing, a compound document is a document type typically produced using word processing software, and is a regular text document intermingled with e.g. spreadsheets, pictures, digital videos, digital audio, and other multimedia features. It can also be used to collect several documents into on...

Microsoft: Microsoft Corporation is the world's biggest software company, with over sixty thousand employees and a physical presence in over sixty countries as of 2005. It was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and is headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA. Microsoft develops, manufactures, lic...