[Panel-devel] Amarok & plasma themes

[Maximilian Kossick]

On Thursday 02 August 2007, Leo Franchi wrote:

SNIP

> > I guess the dataengines would have to be available
> >
> > > outside of Amarok, maybe even by default.
> >
> > well, yes, they have to be in order to be found. they are plugins that
> > are loaded via kservicetypetrader.
> >
> > > Is there a DBUS API for adding dataengines?
> >
> > engines are loaded on demand by applets that use them. there is no need
> > for a
> > dbus api.
>
> regarding the dataengine-outside-amarok thing, i'm not sure how we
> want to deal with this. dataengines are always available---if the
> desktop plasma loads
> an applet that requests an amarok dataengine, it *will* be loaded. question
> is, do we want to elegantly not do anything
> if amarok is not running? also, what about if amarok *is* running and
> plasma loads an amarok applet? ideally, it would work just as it would
> inside amarok.

Loading the Amarok applets in plasma means IPC, so there is a need for some 
kind of dbus api. The question is just how to design the dbus api.
The obvious solution is that we, the Amarok developers, write a dataengine 
which communicates with Amarok using dbus all the time, using a custom dbus 
interface. (There's some optimisation potential here when the engine is 
actually loaded by amarok, but i don't think that will be necessary).

Another option would be a generic proxy data engine in plasma/libplasma which 
uses a generic dbus interface that has to be implemented by the application. 
I don't know if there are other apps which want to integrate 
plasma the way we do, or want to be able to ship with plasma applets for the 
desktop, but each of them will have the same problem: without a reusable 
proxy data engine, they'll have to write code for both sides of the 
communication. A generic proxy data engine would reduce the necessary work for 
the application developers.

Cheers, Max
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