Suggestion about re-usable UI elements

[Daniele E. Domenichelli]

On 27/03/12 22:25, George Kiagiadakis wrote:
> I've been chatting a lot with Laszlo about this, answering to his
> questions, and from my understanding, the goal for them is*not*  to
> have a game that integrates with the IM accounts of the underlying
> desktop. The goal is rather to have a totally standalone client inside
> the game that is managed within the game and does not interfere at all
> with the desktop. In this regard, telepathy only serves as an xmpp
> library and nothing more than that. I still consider it a valid use
> case of telepathy, since it has advantages over using an xmpp library
> directly. It is more abstract, easy to use and feature-complete
> (killer feature is audio calls, which are useful in a game, but are
> really hard to implement without the awesomness of tp-farstream).


If I understand this correctly, the only way to implement this is to run 
telepathy on a private dbus... But why do you want to do that if the 
user has an account already configured on his desktop?


> So, with that in mind, what would be useful for them is having some
> widgets and helper classes to do things easily without reimplementing
> them. The contact list widget (without metacontacts, when these are
> integrated), libktpchat and libktpcall are valid candidates. Of
> course, in the current state it is not easy for them to use them, for
> obvious reasons (why on earth should someone install ktp-call-ui to
> build gluon?). So, what I think we should do is sit and review all the
> stuff that we have, then start moving things in a common public
> library, with proper compatibility promises. This can take a while and
> I really don't think we can have that before GSoC, but in the long
> term we need to consider it and it's probably not too early to start.


I think this is definitely the plan in the long way... I was thinking 
about making the text widget a KPart and move it in a _public_ library 
before 0.4, but time run out very quickly (and that's all fault of our 
evil release manager)

Anyway for 0.5 I would like to have a "high level" public widget library 
that uses ktp-common-internals internally, but exposing only "stable" 
stuff and hiding all the models and contacts/metacontacts stuff. 
Basically the stuff in the "KTp/Widgets" directory of 
ktp-common-internals (that depends on the KTp and KTp/Models 
directories) should be public. For example the grid widget can be 
modified so that the interface exposed won't change if we change the 
model inside; What do you think?

And unfortunately no, this won't be ready for GSoC but we are (I am?) 
really interested in knowing which parts do you actually need, so if you 
feel brave, consider starting using the common-internals library, 
telling us what you actually need and what you miss so that we can try 
to make that part "stable" before next release


Cheers,
  Daniele