The future of Calligra Active

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On 13 March 2013 19:56, Shantanu Tushar Jha <shaan7in at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> During the Calligra sprint last week, we were discussing over Calligra
> Active's future. One good thing that came along is that we started work on
> creating reusable Calligra QML components that can be used in isolation to
> render documents, and perform basic viewing operations. This will help in
> creating Calligra touch UIs for Sailfish etc. Work on this has started and
> we already have the component for Text Documents :)
>
> Another question that came up (follow-up of [1]) was whether Calligra Active
> should remain as a single application to handle every document type, or do
> we want to have a Active version for each corresponding Desktop app. The
> main reason this was an idea is because going by PA's workflow, when we
> would like to create documents we just need to fire the text document
> editing program and it would do its job. A technical motivation behind doing
> that is the difference in the way text docs, spreadsheets, presentations are
> handled in code. For example, text docs are limited in size, scroll
> vertically; spreadsheets are virtually unlimited and scroll in both
> directions; while slideshows don't really "scroll", we switch slides. Due to
> this handling of special cases, the code is also kind of complex and
> breaking it into independent bits might help. There are other factors like
> the way we handle mimetypes etc.

Cool and sweet :)
Regarding splitting, I'd like to ask to discuss the following:
a QML app is typically consisted of many pages and uses the Loader
element to fully dynamically instantiate a component. Is there
anything that stops us from allowing both scenarios: support for all
document types in a single process, and support for one app per type?
If not, let's the apps' creators have the freedom to decide.

The decision is sometimes dependent on:
- performance (having one process that stay cached in the background
can be positive, depends how high-end the device is and what's the OS)
- UX guidelines (separation is sometimes welcome, when apps are
emphasized, in other cases, like PA, there's
document/content-orientation)

In QML as we know, with proper separation of data structures (i.e.
when components do not interfere) it's possible to insert and "app"
within another "app" and that's almost for free.

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
 Kexi & Calligra & KDE | http://calligra.org/kexi | http://kde.org
 Qt Certified Specialist | http://qt-project.org
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek