UNO is not limited to the above applications. The base libraries of UNO are independent of StarOffice and can be used as a framework for other applications. A bridge for COM OLE Automation already exists. UNO is developed by the OpenOffice community including the Sun Microsystems development labs. Other topics are a SOAP bridge and bridges to scripting languages such as python or perl.
Components implement interfaces compliant to their interface specification.
Multiple components communicate only via their interfaces. This allows to implement one component in a different language or to move an implementation to another machine without modifying the other components. This gives you huge flexibility and preserves earlier invested efforts. In general calls are bridged through a single dispatch method. This method is in general easy to implement for e.g. interprocess bridges or bridges to interpreting languages.