[dot] aKademy Developers Conference Prepares for KDE 4

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1125341686/

From: Philip Rodrigues <>
Dept: fun-in-the-sun
Date: Monday 29/Aug/2005, @13:54

aKademy Developers Conference Prepares for KDE 4
================================================

   The 2005 KDE aKademy continued today with the opening of the
developer conference: two days of talks describing upcoming KDE
technologies, giving programming tips and, of course, plenty of informal
hacking and discussion sessions between the developers.  Today's talks
included they keynote from Trolltech, a new multithreading scheduler
library, meta-programming revisited and how to boot to KDE in 10
seconds.  Read on for more.
    aKademy 2005 Group Photo
[http://static.kdenews.org/jr/akademy-2005-group-photo.jpg]
     Eirik Chambe-Eng of Trolltech opened the proceedings with a keynote
describing the company's progress in the past year, along with some of
the ways in which KDE and Qt help one another: KDE provides a huge user
base for Qt, while Trolltech returns the favour by sponsoring several
key KDE developers.

     For those following the plans for KDE 4, Matthias Kretz explained
how the multimedia framework will develop (Transcript
[http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Multimedia+API+Talk], Slides)
[http://conference2005.kde.org/slides/multimedia-api--matthias-kretz.pdf].
Work on designing the framework has been ongoing since last year's
aKademy in Ludwigsburg, where ideas about the way to improve on or
replace the powerful-but-ageing aRts sound system were discussed. The
main feature of the new 'KDEMM' framework is a single KDE  API for
multimedia access which will be able to talk to multiple backends, such
as aRts, NMM [http://www.networkmultimedia.org/] or gstreamer
[http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/].
     Coming up to lunchtime, performance was the theme, with Mirko Böhm
describing ways to use multithreading in KDE applications (Transcript)
[http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Multithreading+Talk], while in
the second track, Lubo Lu&#328;ák presented a talk entitled 'KDE
performance'. At the moment, multithreading is rarely used in KDE, but
Mirko hopes to change that  where it makes sense and improves the user
experience  with his experimental ThreadWeaver library. Lubo showed how
both 'real' methods and 'cheats' can be used (and already are) to
improve the performance of KDE applications. Most impressive was his
demonstration of a 900MHz laptop starting KDE in 10 seconds. He admitted
that this used some cheats, but it showed how there are many ways to
increase the speed of KDE and its applications.

     Returning from lunch in the the nearby part of town, conference
attendees were disappointed to find Zack Rusin's intriguingly-titled
"Beauty and Magic for KDE developers" talk rescheduled to Wednesday
because of some technical problems, but Aaron Seigo stepped in to
present a demo of the new features of Qt Designer in version 4, and how
they can be best used to easily create usable dialogs for KDE
applications (Transcript).
 [http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=School+of+Designer+Talk]
     Closing the day's presentations were demonstrations of three new
technologies: Simon Hausmann explained how Qt 4's "Scribe" text
rendering engine can be used for advanced features in KDE, while Albert
Astals Cid demonstrated the Poppler library (Slides
[http://conference2005.kde.org/slides/poppler/index.html], Transcript)
[http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Poppler+Library+Talk], which
provides PDF rendering, and is planned to be included in KPDF in the
future. In the third track, Mathieu Chouinard presented his work on M2,
a tool for deploying and managing multiple systems on a network.

     With the talks over, the developers retired to the computer rooms
to keep working on their respective areas of KDE, or took the
opportunity to enjoy the warm temperatures and sun of Málaga, before
another full day of talks and presentations tomorrow.