[dot] KDE-Bindings / Kross Meeting

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1216637873/

From: Thomas Moenicke <>
Dept: we-speak-more-languages
Date: Monday 21/Jul/2008, @03:57

KDE-Bindings / Kross Meeting
============================

   Last weekend we hosted the KDE-Bindings
[http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages] and Kross
[http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/Kross] meeting here at
the KDAB [http://www.kdab.net] Office in Berlin/Kreuzberg with the goal
of organising, community building and of course hacking. It was the
first meeting of its type for a bindings crew, with eight people
representing  Ruby [http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/Ruby],
Python [http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/Python], C#
[http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/QtSharp], Lua
[http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/Lqt] and  PHP
[http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/PHP-Qt]. The projects do
not all share code bases, and so it was an opportunity to present and
review the details of how the implementations worked.
    Mauro Iazzi, Thomas Moenicke, Arno Rehn, Cyrille Berger, Aleix Pole
Richard Dale, Sebastian Sauer, Simon Edward
     Python [http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/Python] and
Ruby [http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/Ruby] are in a very
good shape and stable for being used in application development using Qt
and KDE facilities, while Qyoto
[http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/QtSharp], the C# binding
is well on its way to  providing the same level of completeness and
stability. PHP [http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/PHP-Qt]
will try to fill the gap between Desktop and Web Applications using the
powerful technologies in the Qt toolkit, such as QtWebKit for instance.
An interesting new star on the bindings horizon is Lua
[http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/Lqt], which is widely
used for scripting some well known computer games and other
applications.

     As a result of the meeting, we were able to get the Lua bindings
running the cannon game tutorial t7, which is an important milestone in
the progress of a Qt language binding, as it uses custom signals and
slots. Furthermore, Lua bindings have been moved into KDE playground
this week. Another technology we were working on was a Smoke to Kross
bridge that allows one to share objects between e.g. Ruby bindings and
Krossruby. Using it, a developer can show GUI elements using QtRuby and
the underlying QObjects and QWidgets can be picked up on the Kross side.
The issues discussed included how to organise modules and documentation,
improving the design of the template based QList and QMap marshallers
for the Smoke lib, and which modules for the new KDE APIs we should
target.

     An amusing demonstration of the power of some of the KDE bindings
technology happened when Sebastian asked Richard for an estimate about
the effort of make QtRuby applications scriptable with QtScript. He just
came out with a Smoke2 module only 10 minutes later, and after an
additional 10 minutes he wrote a corresponding extension for QtRuby, and
we were quite amazed. More work was also done on the Kross plugins for
Krita and KDevelop. On balance, it was a great meeting with great people
and a nice ambiance at the KDAB [http://www.kdab.net] office.

     Now we are looking forward to Akademy [http://akademy.kde.org/] and
more bindings discussions there. If you are interested in developing
support for programming languages in KDE or writing documentation, just
hop on Freenode in the #kde-bindings or #kross channel, or write an
email to the kde-bindings
[https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-bindings] mailing list, and
we will be very happy to help get you going.

     Thanks to KDAB [http://www.kdab.net] for sponsoring and hosting,
and thanks to the KDE e.V. [http://ev.kde.org/] for supporting the
event.