Require Soprano for kdelibs

[koos vriezen]

2009/8/7 Richard Dale <rdale at foton.es>:
> On Thursday 06 August 2009 07:53:30 pm koos vriezen wrote:
>> > If there are too many entry points and ways to use the library, then
>> > somebody should probably rethink its API :)
>>
>> Right so. And maybe rethinking of what level the features offered
>> should be. What we see on Android/IPhone or eg. with the Eclipse
>> framework, is at a more higher level than what KDE has to offer to the
>> applications. The exceptions are kparts, but it's missing some sort of
>> type library and seem to have stuck in viewers for certain mimetypes.
> The ActiveRDF adaptor in kdebindings/ruby/soprano/activerdf-soprano, that
> allows the Soprano Ruby bindings to be used with the Rails ActiveRecord-like
> ActiveRDF framework, works at a higher level than the Soprano C++ api, and is
> a great RAD environment for Semantic Desktop applications.
>
> The KDE C++ libraries, C++ KParts, plugin apis and the various DBus apis, are
> as good as anything else for RAD when combined with the Ruby or Python
> bindings. I am a bit biased perhaps, but I think we should do more to
> emphasise how well KDE development works with non-C++ languages.

Fully agreed that documentation is really important.


> I recently did some XCode/Objective-C development and I would say it was on a
> par with the Qt/KDE frameworks for developing desktop apps. But I don't that
> we (ie KDE) have anything comparable to the iPhone development environment
> yet, for mobile phones.

My remark was in the light of fewer library dependencies as addition
to the remarks about features vs. dependencies. Higher level, such as
e.g. an API for interacting with the address book database vs. some
kind of extension that only exposes what applications mostly need such
as 'select a contact' and is responsible for the UI part.
The latter can be more easily implemented w/ runtime discovery.

Koos