[kde-edu]: [KDE4] Edu-Shell like Kontact

[Kevin Krammer]

Hi!

I am not a KDE-Edu developer and I have only used  couple of your apps yet, 
but nevertheless I think that I have an overview on KDE technology I want to 
share :)

On Thursday 11 August 2005 17:58, Carsten Niehaus wrote:

> Some of us will be in Malaga in about three month. This is at least Pino,
> Albert, Danny and myself. I would like to kick off a discussion about
> creating a KDE Edu-Shell for kdeedu just like Kontact. In Kontact, every
> app is a KPart (KMail is, KOrganizer is and so on). All apps can of course
> also be used standalone, eg. without starting the "pim-shell" kontact.
> In my idea, every application of kdeedu would become a KPart as well and
> the edu-shell (better names welcome ;-) would just be the glue.

Creating and using componentized applications makes most sense if this 
applications can or should interoperate.
Kontact is a very good example, because the KMail part is handling the mail 
transfer stuff while the KOrganizer part is handling the appointment 
parsing/generating.

The Kontact parts form a new application where part boundaries are not (or 
should not) be visible to the user, it should look to them like one single 
application.

Application morphing, i.e. an application changing into a different one during 
runtime, is, from our developer perspective, really cool stuff.
But as Mattias Ettrich has pointed out in one of his recent blogs, we tend to 
do it more often than necessary, even more often than applicable.

Having that said I don't think it is a bad idea to check component capability 
for edu apps and create wrapper applications for those sharing goals.

For example I could imaging that one could for a word learning (spelling and 
pronounciation) application by integrating KHangMan, KLettres and 
KMessedWords, so that they are more or less different views for the same 
lesson / same word collection.

For applications that are more loosely related, for example sharing topics or 
target student's age, something like Michael Goettsches Launcher application 
would IMHO make more sense.

I imagine something like launcher profiles, where you can tell the launcher 
"show all edu applications with topic mathematic, usable for pupils 6 to 8"

Cheers,
Kevin
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