Plasma Active 3 Sprint - KDE Edu Notes

[Laszlo Papp]

Hey,

I would like to summarize what we achieved (at least my part and
understandings) at the Plasma Active 3 Sprint with regards to the KDE
Edu project.

== Discussion, overall view ==

Cornelius was mentioning some potential customers for educational
purposes, and as such: Plasma Active and Spark might be an interesting
target for them. They have not decided too concrete things yet as far
as I understood. Unfortunately, I do not know more about it.

Another smaller, but very important topic to me is that it would be
nice to get a qml frontend for the khns and get hot new stuff
functionality. Unfortunately, it is not a big enough task for a GSoC
student in my opinion, and I have already put many ideas about Gluon
in there, thus it is not gonna happen as part of that session.

Another good thing is that that we do not need to be afraid of the kde
ui (and similar hard dependencies through the libkdeedu-libkio-kdeui
chain) since it is available on the platform by default and few
megabytes on this platform is not a real burden. Shipping the
dependencies will also be simpler for the Plasma Active App Store than
Ovi hopefully because we do not hopefully need to bundle the
dependencies up with our packages.

Then there were general realizations about not having enough manpower
in the project (there are nowadays more and more platforms to port
to), and it would be nice to improve the collaboration with teachers
and students as well in the future.

== Implementation side ==

=== Packaging ====
1) libkdeedu
2) analitza
3) kalgebra
4) kanagram
5) khangman

See my private repository on the Community OBS for details (things are
there pretty much the results of this event):
https://build.pub.meego.com/project/packages?project=home%3Adjszapi%3AKDE-Devel

=== Coding ===
In general: discussion with Marco about how to construct a Plasma
Active application, as in how to organize the package and source code,
plus certain questions about the usage of the Plasma Active
components.

1) Kanagram now has a plasma active subfolder with the initial steps
(metadata desktop file, ui contents, kdeclaratiview, etc). Ui needs to
be developed (qml files will be added into the package/contents/ui
folder), but the proper structure is already in place.

2) KHangMan has the same establishment, plus I decoupled the "engine"
and the harmattan relevant code, so the engine I established for
Harmattan is reusable for the Plasma Active frontend in the future.
Same thing as with kanagram, ui needs to be developed, thus not much
happened on that front.

There were also other breakout sessions taking place around; some of
which are also very important from KDE Edu application development
point of view, like the SDK and OBS session. Please see the
active at kde.org mailing list for further details about those. There are
already some available feedback and notes over there:
Plasma Active SDK Notes:
http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/active/2012-March/003137.html
Plasma Active App Store Notes:
http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/active/2012-March/003164.html

Many thanks to Anne-Marie for "pushing" us and the project forward! :-)

Best Regards,
Laszlo Papp