How to get the Project Dashboard right

[David Nolden]

2010/5/2 Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org>:
> Easily creating floating entities is not an issue, I can create a floating
> widget in a QGV in 1 minute to, with plasma also and probably with QPainter
> too. The thing is that we need some platform that:
> * is configurable
This is no + point for plasma, as its kind configurability doesn't
suit our purposes, I wouldn't want to see any of the plasma
configuration UIs in KDevelop. We don't need custom themes, we don't
need rotatable/resizable per-pixel movable applets, etc. etc., so you
will have to rewrite the configuration mechanisms anyway.

> * is layouted
> * lets our plugins to put as many things we want
> * Makes it easy to create new items
> * Makes it easy for these items to be flexible
> * Makes it easy to modify and put new data flexibly
>
> One good thing I really like about plasma is that it lets us add items that
> doesn't come from a plugin.
>
> For example:
> we can have the user to add rss and he adds the rss plasmoid for the project
> and we will get that for free and without adding a kdevelop rss plugin which
> would be weird and the same with anything else. Yes, I know we don't want
> clocks on the dashboard but I like that we can also put stuff that doesn't
> depend on kdevelop but just to show. Webview applet is a good example too.

But if you want to do anything special to the plasma RSS applet, you
first have to create a painful stable C++ interface between KDevelop
and the applet, and then you end up maintaining it. It may be easy to
get going, but then it becomes complicated, and in future we will
suffer from all the typical problems you have when you integrate a
library that is internally permanently changing (see kate right now).

There should be tons of web RSS applets available that one can put
into a web-page, so why not simply take such one and put it into our
dashboard? I think since the dashboard is a kind of "information
center" for information that comes mainly from the web, web-technology
is the right technology to solve the problem.

> (according to the plasma+kdepim guy these plasmoids will be moved to kdelibs
> in the near future)
>
> Note: if I'm taking all that time discussing about that is because I
> wouldn't really like to decide to do our-thing (tm) and end up by finding
> all the problems when it's done. It's not like I have any special interest
> on using Plasma but I want to have something that fits our needs now and in
> the future for most users.

There is one more option that seems even preferrable: Why not use
simple Qt widgets? Then any plugin could provide a widget together
with some information, and all the configurability you need is the
place where you stick the widget into a QLayout. Each widget could
then decide whether it wants to use a QWebView for the contents (for
example for RSS), or whether it paints its contents natively.

Greetings, David