[Kde-bindings] KDE/kdebindings

[Richard Dale]

On Saturday 10 May 2008 14:58:34 Sebastian Sauer wrote:
> > I agree that following the standard Plasma packaging
> > convention for non-C++ languages is certainly a good idea, and probably
> > using the ScriptEngine api will have advantages in the future. I'll try
> > and get a ScriptEngine/Korundum based binding done in the playground,
> > rather than in kdebindings itself - I've thought about it a bit and it
> > will be possible to get pretty much the same api as I had before with a
> > bit of work.
>
> Even more great to hear.
On Saturday I was thinking about this again and I realised that the 
krubyplugfactory allows me to write any KDE plugin in Ruby, and that the 
ScriptEngine script runners are just another sort of plugin. I already have 
all the apis for script runners wrapped as bindings in Ruby. This means that 
it is actually possible to implement the Ruby script runners for applets and 
data engines in Ruby, which makes it pretty trivial. 

I need to understand the package format a bit more, because you need to write 
code that describes the layout of a package (also possible in Ruby). The big 
problem is that the scripting api doesn't give you any way to access KConfig 
stuff, and not being able to read and write config data is a bit of a show 
stopper. I may need to cheat for now to work round that until there is 
an 'official' way of doing it.

> >> > The KDE community doesn't actually have any beginner ruby programmers,
> >> > only intermediate and advanced, and so while a dead simple interface
> >> > is good for JavaScript or BASIC, it isn't needed for Ruby.
> >>
> >> to sum it up: What is advanced in JavaScript is pre-beginners in Ruby,
> >> hehe
> >>
> >> :) Sorry, failed to resist.
> >
> > Yes, maybe ruby programmers are a bunch of snobs.
> >
> > Actually I think JavaScript is an interesting language, and there are
> > some libraries like Prototype, Dojo and JQuery that actually give you a
> > very nice programming environment. So there are certainly many advanced
> > JavaScript programmers, but there are so many more JavaScript programmers
> > that on average they are beginners.
>
> Well, for me a very important part of a language is what you are able to do
> with it. There is just no cpan-like collection of modules around for
> JavaScript and in my eyes that language just didn't left it's original
> purpose to run on client-side combined with a browser yet. That may change
> next few years but I don't see that happen any time soon. Well, we will
> see :)
I think for Plasma there will be the same percentage of people currently using 
Python, Ruby and JavaScript - ie Python the most popular (c. 40%), then Ruby 
(c. 35%) and then JavaScript (15-20%), others (< 5%). Because the same people 
that use PyQt or QtRuby will also want to write applets. Maybe now there are 
complete bindings for Qt and Plasma in QtScript that might change. 

-- Richard