This report is part 1 of 2, covering the month of October. Part 2,
when available, will be an overview of the usual mailing-list
material.
Despite the dearth of reports on my side, there has been furious
development activity and some major architectural
changes in KDE over the past month. A technology overview by
Mosfet is also available; overlaps in
the material presented here were unintentional but harmless.
KParts (aka Canossa) is the new replacement for OpenParts, the
previous CORBA-based mechanism for embedding one application in
another. Unlike OpenParts, KParts is optimized for use on the local
desktop and is based on a purely C++/shared-library approach. KParts
is not a replacement for CORBA, it simply replaces CORBA for the
particular task of embedding one application in another -- something
which CORBA was not designed to do.
For developers, KParts is simpler and much easier to use; compile time
has also been significantly improved. Users enjoy a less bloated
enviroment as well as speed and stability improvements. KParts has
already proven itself to be a big hit -- KOffice parts and friends
were almost completely ported in a matter of days.
DCOP (Desktop Communication Protocol) is a new lightweight and
fast IPC/RPC mechanism based on X's standard ICE (Inter-Client
Exchange) protocol. It is meant to unify previous IPC mechanisms such
as KDE 1's kwmcom and various other hacks. DCOP
is simple, small and efficient and is consequently much better suited
to the task of IPC than CORBA (which was not really designed for this
task). All KDE applications are linked against the DCOP library and
so can communicate efficiently and easily as required. Preston Brown
has already implemented a KUniqueApplication
feature through some DCOP magic.
Developing optimally for KDE2 no longer requires being a CORBA
expert, although the CORBA-based KOM (KDE Object Model) is still
available for distributed applications. It is perhaps quite important
that the distinction between local and distributed applications be
made in this manner, as outlined by this interesting paper
from Sun Microsystems (gzip and postscript viewer required). The
bottom line: writing a distributed application is *hard* and blurring
the distinction with local applications is not desireable.
But what about interoperability? While DCOP is based on the
standard ICE protocol, the streaming protocol used still needs to be
implemented by non-KDE/Qt applications. Although a direct approach is
possible (such as Richard Moore's ongoing port to Java), Kurt Granroth
sidestepped
the issue completely by implementing an XML-RPC <--> DCOP bridge.
What this means is that any platform or language that can do XML and
HTTP can now communicate with, control or script KDE applications.
Alternately, DCOP applications should be able to communicate with
XML-RPC applications, including those running on Redmondian OSes.
A CORBA wrapper for KParts and DCOP is also possible,
and would enable interaction with other environments such as GNOME.
aRts. It has been decided that an optimized subset of aRts, the
realtime synthesizer, will be included as the multimedia framework for
KDE 2. There has also been a show of interest in aRts from the GNOME
camp -- Stefan Westerfeld appears quite committed to meet everyone's
concerns.
aRts is now also interoperable
with the highly-praised sequencing software Brahms
(formerly kooBase). It is now possible to use KDE for professional
music to some degree, with future improvements in store. In the long
run, the Brahms/aRts combination should become something similar to
the CuBase/VST combo. These are exciting times indeed.
Sycoca is the new system configuration cache designed by Waldo
Bastian and currently maintained by David Faure. Sycoca is a fast
binary cache of mostly static data, generally stored in ASCII config
files, such as mimetypes and services. Significantly improved
application startup time has already been reported.
Kicker development has picked up pace as well -- it now takes
advantage of DCOP and will soon be ready to replace kpanel. Daniel
"Mosfet" Duley hacked
a very nifty feature that allows any client DCOP application to easily
allocate a temporary submenu (and menu items) to kicker. There's no
need to restart kicker for the changes to take effect either. Mosfet
also made available a screenshot
demonstrating docking. Graham TerMarsch implemented
a couple of applets and included a small screenshot.
A new toolkit for KDE? Chun Fong wrote in with details
on his attempt to port the Fresco toolkit to KDE.
Fresco appears to be a nice C++ GUI with thread support and is
available under an X11-type license. A new toolkit that supports KDE
could possibly be quite beneficial, an existing example is Ktk. Please contact
Chun if you are interested in
helping with such an effort.
Java. And last, but certainly not least, Lars Knoll's new
DOM-based HTML library now includes Richard Moore's integrated support
for Java applets -- konqueror will be java-capable! Other KDE
applications can also easily embed java applets.
An archive for these reports is available. Une
version francaise pourrait eventuellement etre disponible ici.
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K Desktop Environment
