[dot] News from KDE Web Dev

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1154372541/

From: Eric Laffoon <sequitur at kde.org>
Dept: what-that-menu-item-is-for
Date: Monday 31/Jul/2006, @12:02

News from KDE Web Dev
=====================

   The Quanta development team is pleased to announce our Hot New Stuff
[http://www.kstuff.org/] server implementation is now running. This
means that Quanta Plus [http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/] users can now
begin taking advantage of KNewStuff. We are also preparing for exciting
new developments we want to work on during the upcoming Akademy in
Ireland. We will have at least four developers there and we very much
appreciate any help rasing funds [http://kdewebdev.org/donate.php] for
travel, accommodation and other expenses. Two of our developers have
notebooks running 500 MHz or slower and I would like to get them new
notebooks for the conference. You can contributed to the project at the
kdewebdev [http://kdewebdev.org/] site. Finally development has resumed
on Kommander [http://kommander.kdewebdev.org/], read on for full
details.



                   WEB DEV'S HOT NEW STUFF IS ONLINE

     First of all what is Hot New Stuff? Glad you asked. Josef Spillner
had a very cool idea and it's sort of the idea we all should have gotten
looking at the promise of the internet and applications and especially
the open source/free software community. Why not connect from within an
application to share resources across the global user community? In fact
one difference between our software and a $500 professional web
development package, aside from the fact that ours works better and is
more productive, is that the professional package has all kinds of nice
polished scripts, snippets and such-like packaged with it. Maybe we
could bloat up Quanta+ with some effort, but on the other hand what is
essential and what is a waste of bandwidth? It is too hard to say. With
KNewStuff we can resolve that question while also engaging our huge user
base to enable a lot more useful additions than we could ever consider
packaging. The idea is that if you have something good and want to share
it, put it into our global repository. You can upload or download it
right from Quanta as you work. You only need to be online to use it.

     So what specifically can be shared? Well using the web interface
[http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/resources.php], virtually anything. However
you can also find menus and context menus in Quanta to upload or
download DTDs (DTEP), Documentations, Toolbars, Templates and Scripts.
Let's say you want a reference for HTML, PHP, Javascript or MySQL? Go to
the docs tab in the right dock, right click, download and there you have
it. Now you can right click a tag or function in the editor and it will
recognise where you are and pull up context help for what you are
clicking on.

     Maybe you want to beautify your PHP? Werner Joss has a Kommander
dialogue you can download and use. In addition to this it is possible to
set up and use other repositories. If you have a team of developers
working on a large project you can use this feature to manage shared
resources which are only exposed to your group.

     What else should you know? Well as we begin using this we will no
doubt find things we want to improve. We already have a list of feature
enhancements for the next version of Quanta including the ability to
interface with user accounts to make it easier for users to upload and
for administrators to process large amounts of data. I have not covered
everything here, but you can ask questions here and developers will be
reading this. There are a few quirks and we want to do some enhancements
on the server side too. However we want to get this in use and gathering
resources for the community. We also welcome people interested in
helping to admin resource submissions which need to be looked at.
Obviously security is a concern and it is possible to set up digital
signatures and sign upload packages. You will get a warning when
downloading unsigned packages, though we try to make sure everything is
safe.



          HELP OUR DEVELOPERS MEET AT THIS YEAR'S CONFERENCE

     Every year KDE developers meet at Akademy
[http://conference2006.kde.org/] and it is fun and educational. For the
last two years Akademy was held right at release time and it was
difficult to focus on brainstorming. This year it falls right in the
early stages of development for KDE 4. So it will be tremendously
valuable for getting information, feeding back to core developers and
working on substantial improvements. We will have a long list including
improvements to our KNewStuff implementation, finishing the
functionality for Team Projects and annotation and messaging features as
well as switching over to using the KDevelop framework and gaining
selected additional functionality. I also have some rather large goals
for creating a framework to do object oriented development based on
templates. This would be based on a framework that is interactively
developed by users during regular development and the ability of a
parent file to manage mediation requests from child objects. The idea
being that it could be a very simple aid, yet could transform into a
complex framework over several months of use, but it would not front
load the user. You would simply shift from repeatedly fixing errors in
your pages to fixing your framework and directives. Eventually you
eliminate the amount of drudge work you are comfortable with the design
trade offs for. In addition to this I want to have new interfaces for
dealing with user defined groups of design elements in holistic views of
your project. This would enable powerful manipulations of multiple areas
of work in single operations. In my opinion the static page/file editing
model for web sites is lacking, sort of like building databases with
flat file data management when SQL is so much more elegant. We want to
realise the potential of visual development more too. This is just part
of our dream list which we may finally be able to have time for in this
release.

     While we're working on this at the conference we have to compile
and test, and this can take long enough to take a walk if using a slower
system. Doing this dozens of times a day is a waste of a lot of that
day. We do get some help from KDE e.V. on travel, but that leaves a
portion to cover and two of our developers are sponsored. There are
additional costs to traveling too. I mentioned notebooks. It would take
probably less than 40 average donations to buy two decent notebooks. I
am sure we have thousands of active web developers and probably millions
of people who at least play at it. We have had good response from the
community and perhaps with a little more we could have another developer
sponsored for other areas we want to cover. Your help is appreciated!
 [http://kdewebdev.org/donate.php]


                 KOMMANDER DEVELOPMENT IS ACTIVE AGAIN

     If youa re not familiar with Kommander
[http://kommander.kdewebdev.org/] you probably should be. If you look at
kde-apps.org [http://www.kde-apps.org/] you will regularly see Kommander
programs appearing and there is even a section for them there. Kommander
is a visual development tool based on Qt Designer and an executor for
Kommander files. It uses DCOP to manipulate data and exchange with other
KDE applications and is very powerful. Even if you've never developed a
program you can visually draw a dialogue and then create functionality
using the point and click function bowser similar to the function tool
in KSpread. Imagine creating an extention for a program as easy as
making a spreadsheet! We use Kommander for the HTML Quick Start dialog
in Quanta, which means you can edit and change it if you like.

     Michal Rudolf has been our primary developer on Kommander and he
has done a lot. For reasons relating both to his schedule and the level
of support we received last year he had to take some time off. Now he is
back. We are fixing bugs in the wizard implementation and he will be
working on a database plugin. We have a list of things we want to do to
improve development which will be released shortly for KDE 3.x. We are
looking at how to enhance Kommander as much as possible, but also some
new development features and some executor features. Those would include
a project facility, an installer for distributing programs, the ability
to create and load KParts, an improved plugin system, improvements to
internal scripting, a real text editor, including MainWindow development
in the editor (you can create it in Designer and then rename it and
change the version tag and open it in Kommander) and facilitating the
large scripting requirements of MainWindow development better. We're
also going to work on parameters for functions and signal/slot
relationships. We want to get a more vital user community and look at
how to include the executor in the base KDE packages.

     Look for news here when we have the database plugin available and a
richer feature set. If you want to help with Kommander but are not a C++
coder you can start by joining our user mailing list
[http://mail.kdewebdev.org/mailman/listinfo/kommander] and you can give
us feedback, test new versions and get involved in the creation of
Kommander dialogues for development of Kommander applications. You can
also donate [http://kdewebdev.org/donate.php] to the project.

     Before I go I want to express my thanks to you in the community for
all your support over the years of our project. Between work and this
project I have pushed myself a lot and became ill. I am only now getting
more active again. I still get great emails from people just discovering
Quanta and Kommander who love it. After being on this project for six
years it is still one of the best parts of my life. Knowing just how
precious life is makes all of my friends who are users and developers
that much more special. Thanks to everyone, especially those who sent me
their best wishes this year.