KDE 4 Solid network management work

[Will Stephenson]

I've been working for the past few days on the network management architecture 
for KDE 4, and I'd like to let you know what's happening. 

I am currently working in the Solid/kdehw project on backend classes that will 
be used by knetworkmanager in KDE 4 to control networking.  This is similar 
to the split in knm-make-it-cool.  Solid abstracts the backend, so that in 
theory alternative backends to NetworkManager are possible, but I expect NM 
to be the default.  So the system looks like this:

1) NetworkManager applet
	|
---------------------------------
    (SOLID)
        |
2) Frontend classes
        |
3) Backend interface
        | 
4) Specific backend for Networkmanager 
(for example, following layers assume this)

---------------------------------
        |
       dbus
        |
NetworkManager daemon

The goal is to have easy to use classes in 2) that take care of the memory 
management for 1), an intuitive OO API that does not follow the peculiarities 
of NM or any other backend, and features that will drive NM development, like 
interface statistics.

I'm currently finishing the first iterations of 2) and 3)  My next plans are 
to write a quick fake backend (4)for testing those, and to work on a NM 
backend using the new Qt4 dbus bindings at Akademy next week.  The current 
work has a lot missing still vs. knm, for example dialup and VPN support.  
And it's still just a library, testbed programs are in progress though.

If you want to check out the code so far, it's here:

http://websvn.kde.org/branches/work/kdehw/solid/, networkdevice.h, network.h, 
wirelessnetwork.h, networkmanager.h are frontend classes, corresponding 
backend interfaces are in ifaces/, backends will be in kdehw/backends.

bye for now

Will