[Kde-bindings] Kross

[Sebastian Sauer]

Hi *,

a while ago I wrote about Kross and it's usage within KOffice 
( http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-bindings&m=112637628020341&w=2 ).

We have made very nice progress. So, some infos;

1. Interpreters

Currently we have 2 working interpreter plugins which are, if installed, 
dynamicly loaded and provided to Kross. The Python-plugin embeds a 
python-interpreter and bridges the Kross API into the python-world while the 
by Cyrille Berger developed Ruby-plugin does the same for Ruby.

2. Integration

Extending applications with in a scripting language written plugin is quit 
easy. You are even able to use pyQt and pyKDE to access dcop or create 
GUI-dialogs which are displayed as part of your application (without letting 
your application need to know anything about pyqt or python at all). Cause 
other GUI-toolkits like TkInter are working as well, it's not needed to 
depend on pyqt to display some GUI-elements. In fact at Kexi we use a little 
py-script which spends abstract access to dialogs. If pyQt isn't installed we 
fall back to TkInter.

3. Applications

While Kross started initialy as extension for Kexi, it was lately moved to the 
KOffice libraries and Cyrille Berger integrated it into Krita. So, we have 
currently two applications using the Kross-framework what isn't that bad to 
start with :)~

Kexi demonstrates with 3 scripts the usage. The first one is called 
ProjectDocumentator.py and generates some documentation about the loaded 
project and it's via KexiDB stored data. The other both are named 
ExportXHTML.oy and ImportXHTML.py. With the first one you are able to export 
a table or query to a XHTML-file while the second allows us to import data 
from such a XHTML-file into a table. The import script uses the Python SAX 
event-driven XML-parser what should enable us to import large collections of 
data. The main point here is, that we even extended the functionality of Kexi 
with just a hand full of python-code rather then a more complex SAX-import 
written with C/C++. Think of pyUNO to access OpenOffice.org via python or 
LDAP import/export scripts. There are a lot of nice ways to extend an 
application with little scripts.

4. The future?

Who knows what will happen in near future. I guess following both points are 
from interest for Kross and would need some of my time;
- Port to Qt4 and integrate (maybe as plugin?) some code to work with the 
QMeta*-stuff.
- Auto-generate bindings (Smoke? maybe even just provide a 
Kross-to-SmokeRuntimes bridge?, KDevelop4 cpp-parser?).

-- 
Sebastian Sauer aka dipesh[sebsauer]
http://www.dipe.org/public_key.asc
Fingerprint: 8F1E 219B 16E6 4EC7 29CC F408 E193 65E2 9134 2221
Coder in http://www.koffice.org/kexi && http://www.kmldonkey.org
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