[Kde-bindings] KOffice Scripting for KDE4 (Was Re: Moving kross(kexi/scriptingcore) in libs)

[Richard Dale]

On Friday 04 November 2005 16:04, Ian Reinhart Geiser wrote:
> > I miss Richard Dale in your cc-list, by the way... And maybe it would be
> > a good idea to also add Phil Thompson, Simon Edwards and Jim Bublitz to
> > the list of people who may have something interesting to say? They
> > weren't at OSDW, but they all have worked on scripting bindings for Qt
> > and KDE, and there isn't any larger KDE scripting/binding community than
> > PyQt/KDE.
>
> Well there are two parts to this.  The big one is that pretty much everyone
> has made a pretty obvious effort to not work together.  Its either their
> way or their way.  Really I am tired of it, and pretty much joined them in
> that optinion.  The only difference is that I want to solve this in a
> manner so we don't have to care.  By making KParts the interface, there
> only has to be one plugin layer, then the higher level language people just
> have to bind to the kparts interfaces, and build the proxy to forward the
> interface methods. Again PyQt, Java and KJSEmbed have already solved this.
>  I think Ruby may have too, but I have not seen the bugger in action.  The
> point is that once KParts is extended the fruits of Richard Dale will be
> sampled by every KDE application that uses KParts. (read pretty much every
> KDE application)
I haven't been working on scripting at all, and so I really haven't put much 
thought into it. Sebastian has sent me a description of kross, and it sounds 
perfectly useful to me. 

What I have been working on, is parsing the complete C++ api in order to 
generate bindings in various languages that cover the complete api. But I 
don't think a good scripting api should look like the C++ one translated into 
ruby/python or whatever. For instance, it is possible to call all the Kate 
DCOP interface methods from the ruby bindings, but it doesn't make it a good 
scripting api at all.

To me what's missing is the notion of a KOffice 'document' with paragraphs, 
and a way of doing things like selecting the first word in a sentence. At the 
moment all we have is a pile of hard to understand DCOP methods - there needs 
to be a higher level api built on top of DCOP/DBUS for KDE 4.

-- Richard