[Panel-devel] Amarok & plasma themes

[Ian Monroe]

On 8/2/07, Maximilian Kossick <mkossick at gmx.de> wrote:
> 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).

Everything that happens on a track change is speed-critical since
something that bogs things down too much can cause noticable pauses
(especially in single-procs)... also when a song begins is when your
mostly likely to want to look at this stuff.

Anyways straight-up dbus might still be fast enough.

As far as what lfranchi is working on, probably wouldn't be hard to
switch to a dbus-based system from the current libamarok-system in the
future, so I would say he already has plenty to worry about currently.
:)

> 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
>