Moving QExtMDI to kdelibs

F@lk Brettschneider falk.brettschneider at gmx.de
Wed May 14 22:39:35 BST 2003


Hi,

Some comments:

1.) MDI just stands for *any* visualization of an application that works 
with multiple documents at the same time.

2.) Do not think QextMDI is equal to Microsoft's MDI approach!!!
      QextMDI just supports this mode as one of 4 visualization modes 
(switchable at runtime) because
      a) many users like it and
      b) this is an important condition for companies which want to 
easily port their apps to KDE
      You might disable that mode in a KDE configuration "old-fashioned 
Unix" or "new-fashioned Win32".

3.) The API of QextMDI allows to add new visualization modes like e.g. 
used in Kate.

4.) KDevelop, Quanta, KBear use or want to use QextMDI. This should be 
reason enough to share it in a KDE base lib.

5.) The KDE style guide is unsufficient!!! The idea tends in the right 
direction but it's too restrictive
      and
      a) doesn't reflect the real needs of more complex apps like e.g. IDEs
      b) the term "MDI" is used wrongly. TabPage modes like in Konqueror 
or Toplevel modes like in Borland Builder are MDI as well.

6.) QextMDI also tries to support a generic way of handling tool-views. 
You add them in the same way but a little flag decides if they're docked 
as splitter views in the main widget or if they're stay-on-top toplevel 
tool-windows like e.g. in Photoshop.

Ciao
F at lk


BTW: Currently, I'm trying a change of the QextMDI view type "tool-view" 
to let them use QDockWindow as base class instead of KDockWidget.

http://www.geocities.com/gigafalk/qextmdi.htm






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