News Archive for August 2000

The announcement is here:

http://www.kde.org/announcements/gfresponse.html

"The Queesio project was intended as a Visio type application for KDE, the author, Dave Marotti was having trouble finding time to finish the project, and we were looking at creating a Visio type product," said Shawn Gordon, president of theKompany.com. "Dave is a great guy and very knowledgeable, so we were pleased to work with him on the project. We are doing a major rewrite and converting Queesio to KParts so it can inter operate with the other KOffice applications, because of the extensive changes, the project has been renamed to Kivio and will be hosted on our website. We are pleased to offer our support and know-how to this important part of ongoing Linux application development."

The press release

"It is really great to work together with all of the dedicated developers, translators, artists, documentation writers and beta users. I'm very proud of the results that we have achieved with this release and I hope that our users enjoy it just as much," said core developer Waldo Bastian. "Given the massive amount of fixes and improvements in usability as well as appearance, this beta preview could also have been labeled a pre-release candidate for Kopernicus," added core developer Lars Knoll."

The announcement

(1) Whenever a performant and lightweight communication is required, shared library components -- language dependent and toolkit dependent -- are chosen in KDE. KParts provides a maximum of performance while eating as few resources as possible, and in addition it provides an _extremely_ powerful object model. An object model every average KDE/Qt developer is already familiar with: The Qt object model. This means people don't have to learn yet another big complicated technology like CORBA, in order to make their hacked-in-their-free-time-small-application communicate with other components on the desktop.

Classical examples here are: (i) embedding an image viewer component into a browser shell, (ii) an image editing plugin which applies a special mathematical-O-difficult algorithm on a 16MB RGBA image.

For these examples, performance and resources are more important than stuff like network transparency. Noone is going to embed a remote spreadsheet document into a word document, running on a machine on the other side of the ocean. This is a nice dream and it is certainly technically interesting (no doubt about that), but it is not what the average desktop user really wants. The priorities are different here.

(2) Another kind of components are applications as-is. Think of the following example: You have a text editor application open somewhere, you click on a text document in your file browser and you want to re-use the existing text editor application instance to open up the document in a new window. Another example is scripting. Let me paste a few lines of real-life working python code, which speaks for itself:

       from dcop import *
       app = DCOPApplication( "kspread" )
       documents = app.KSpreadIface.documents()
       doc = documents[0]
       table = doc.map().table( "Table1" );
       cell = table.cell( 10, 20 );
       cell.setText( table.cell( 2, 1 ).text() + " Blah" );
    

Here language independence and network transparency have priority, no doubt. And that's why KDE uses DCOP, based on the standard ICE library. DCOP is easy to learn (for example human readable object names in contrast to unreadable CORBA IORs) and is extremely lightweight -- have a look at the library size and the memory consumption. Not to mention that the protocol is far less complex than IIOP and supports sugar like signals and slots.

There exist DCOP bindings for C. (Though unreleased because I'm still in the process of cleaning up and fixing some last issues). I hacked up a small but illustrative example that uses DCOP to embed a small GTK application into a KDE shell. And yes, it works "over the wire".

In conclusion, KParts is one specialized component architecture in KDE and DCOP is a second one, developed to address languange independence, and network transparency. We simply make a distinction, depending on what components are needed on the desktop.

And Simon's modest disclaimer:

Please note that this is only my personal humble view/opinion.

Please click here for the full unedited email. See here for David Faure's nice tutorial on KParts.

The announcement

Thank you LinuxWorld voters!

" The main improvement is certainly Konqueror, the integrated file manager and browser. Thanks to the KParts component technology, it's a very generic and powerful tool. Basically, it lets you browse and view almost everything, may that be web pages, directories, text documents, images, remote machines or whatever. Via our lightweight middleware, the Desktop Communication Protocol (DCOP), all services are easily accessible to all applications. Overall, KDE 2 is a much tighter integrated desktop compared to KDE 1. "

The interview

The article

This developer portal incorporates a KDE/Qt class repository, and has a few submissions already. To get an idea of how useful this can be, check out QxPieWidget. So start cranking that code and submit your new Qt2/KDE2 classes already! You'll earn the praise and admiration of the KDE community.

" For Eazel and Helix Code, this is an attempt to control the de facto Linux interface and make money on service agreements. For the Free Software Foundation, this is a sell-out: the way the GNOME Foundation proposes to impose "standards" on the Linux community goes directly against what Richard Stallman has been preaching for years, and his silence on the creation of the GNOME Foundation is very disappointing. "

The article

" Thanks to the recent press releases at LinuxWorld regarding the GNOME foundation, some journals have already written off KDE. The reason for the write off has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with a narrow vision of computing's "history".

The article

By the way it is a GPL application :-)

"[On whether there will ever be a KDE Foundation] No, if we did, we'd probably lose half of our developers. It is very important to us that the developers maintain total control of the plans and directions for KDE. We would not tolerate the creation of any kind of oversight committee."

The conversation with Kurt

KDE might lack the PR attack dogs, spin teams or budgets of the rival Gnome project, but maybe it doesn't need them.

"It's more talk than substance," says KDE developer Richard Moore of the new Gnome Foundation, backed by Sun and friends. "But maybe the substance will come later at LinuxWorldExpo," he told The Register.

The article.

Martin Skjøldenrand of Linux Gazette reviews Quanta, a young and rapidly maturing KDE HTML project manager and editor.

Quanta is one of the numerous emerging projects using KDE as their solid foundations. It already has a rather large collection of features and its KDE-2 compliant version is in the work. Go take a peak. And maybe you decide to give a hand of help too.

This chapter is a MUST READ for any aspiring KParts developer.

You can read the chapter online at the KDE Developer Corner:

http://developer.kde.org/documentation/tutorials/kparts/

"KDE 2.0 Development" is the first book from Sams Publishing that will be distributed under the Open Publication License. It is authored by longtime KDE contributor David Sweet. Critical chapters are written and technical edited by core KDE developers - Matthias Ettrich, David Faure, Kurt Granroth, Stefan Westerfeld, Cristian Tibirna, Ralf Nolden, and Espen Sand. It covers pretty much everything you need to know to start developing in KDE 2.0. Topics include: KDE UI Compliance, KDE Style Reference, The Qt Toolkit, Responsive User Interface, Complex-Function KDE Widgets, Theming, Multimedia, DCOP, KParts, Creating Documentation, Packaging Code, CVS and CVSUP, and KDevelop.

QTCUPS is a CUPS graphical front-end and a development library for Qt. It is intended to provide CUPS support for Qt applications. It also include a graphical front-end for CUPS which is intended to be a replacement of "lpr". These tools allows for easy printer selection and configuration (with possibility to save printer options).

QTCUPS-0.2 has been released. This release adds some new features and fixes some bugs. Here's a short summary of the changes :

• new PPD widget in the form of a tree view
• added PPD constraint support
• complete synchronization between tabs (especially PPD tab and the other)
• changed image tab layout (added gamma correction and removed PS tab)
• added "lpr" syntax, and reading from stdin
• added class support : classes are shown with a different icon and are configurable (like printers with no PPD file)
• fixed some bugs

Michael.

Kaim home page.

Yet, all these outstanding happenings weren't enough for our excellent friends that we affectionately call "the trolls". They released today the first of a (hopefully short) series of beta iterations of their newest and greatest software: Qt-2.2.

But, as incredible as it may seem, they wasn't pleased enough with their doing so they also released the Qt Designer.If you're a Qt/KDE developer and you don't know what's Qt Designer, then rest assured that you will know, and in short order.

Go take the Qt-2.2 Beta 1 today and learn why layouts and tab ordering don't necessarily need to be a pain, or how Qt can work with threads too. And don't forget to write down, report and help squash those bugs. This is in our interest of us all, since Qt-2.2 will be the fundament of KDE-2.0 that rushes toward release healthier and happier than ever.

Thank you, nice friends at Troll Tech.

" So we have Kmail. Kmail is an email client which has received very little attention in the press, but is one of the sturdiest little email clients out there for Linux, and unless you're willing to delve into the command line worlds of Pine and MH, there aren't that many clients out there which old regular Joe Citizen would be willing to use. In fact, Kmail is the ideal solution for small businesses, and conveniently comes bundled with most major Linux distributions, included in KDE 1.1.2, and the soon to be KDE 2. "

The article.

And because Dennis ain't your traditional journalist, he goes really in depth and finds weak points and criticizes. Developers like to have this too because immediatly after tea or caffeine (for long nights) and a powerful processor (for fast compilations), there's nothing nearer to developers' hearts than cluefull users that can test and write bug reports.

Fortunately, almost all problems raised by Dennis in his review are take care of or in way to be solutioned already.

Thanks a lot, Dennis, for yet another great review.