de-mythifing KDevelop and KOffice

[Alexander Dymo]

As KDevelop developer I'd like to "de-mythify" it a little bit ;)

> I see that in various places KDevelop and KOffice are named as the two
> biggest projects that achieved a lot by a very small team of developers,
> that also carries the request for help of other developers to make this
> aclaimed applications (or set of applications) better.
> I consider myself a developer and to be honest I'd be afraid of putting my
> hands in either KDevelop nor KOffice. Why ? Because from the outside both
> seems to be extremely complex things, that can be broken easily.
> KDevelop... a program for programmers... you need to make high quality
> code, there are tons of plug ins (and that means a complex plug in
> structure) and the complex and huge amount of templates.
Generally, to work on KDevelop you shouldn't be the expert in programming.
If you work with KDevelop (even if you have just started with a tutorial) then
KDevelop becames your tool which you can adjust to your needs. So "a program
for programmers" becames "a program for you". I bet once you have learned
KDevelop in a user level and started to work in it, you see various things
(not necessarily very complex) to improve.
I mostly refer to myself here, but my way to KDevelop developer was exactly
as I described above. I wanted to have a good IDE where I can write programs,
I started with KDevelop and I started to fix little things that annoyed me.
For example, the first thing I done was the little improvement in c++ new
class wizard which allows specifying the base class. 
So, I'm sure there are tons of little things that can be done by a new
programmer.

Now about complexity of KDevelop internals. The program has pretty good
and easy plugin-based design. Everything in KDevelop is a plugin - a class
derived from KDevPlugin interface. Interfaces are well understood and
documented. 
You think that the fact we have tons of plugins denotes complexity and you are
wrong here! If we had a complex plugin structure (complex interfaces) we
wouldn't have so many plugins. 
The plugin structure does denote that KDevelop is easy to extend. Let my main
argument here be a code itself. Just create "KDevelop Part" using KDevelop
application wizard and you will get working plugin written using just several
lines of code. That code will include a class derived from KDevPlugin which
have only constructor and destructor and a class derived from QWidget
to embed into KDevelop toolviews. Nothing that complex!

You say it's easy to break things. If you work on a new plugin or improve
existing, you just can't break things. Plugins are independent, the fact that
one particular plugin doesn't work correctly does not imply that others will
break too (as long as your plugin doesn't crash, of course;) ). That's one of
the main points of pluggable architecture.
I won't say there are no ways to break things. Plugins use core interfaces
to communicate to each other, and if you modify interfaces there is always
a risk of breaking something. But if you are a newbie, you don't want to
touch interfaces, do you? ;)

Of course, there are plugins that do complex tasks like language support parts
or project managers. They are indeed complex but I want to say that
there is always a possibility to make things in a simple way and KDevelop
always allows to do so. Take a look, for example, at cpp support with
code completion, language parser and other glorious stuff and take a look
at ruby support that is so simple. Today I'm very curious why we don't
have c# support in KDevelop. One could wrote basic c# support
in a single day (or even in a couple of hours using "KDevelop language
support" application template).

Some of KDevelop plugins have even their own plugin structure that can
simplify your task even more. For example, if you want to write compiler
options dialog for your beloved compiler, you need to know only about
KDevCompilerOptions interface and nothing more. I designed new
documentation part in KDevelop in the same plugin-based way.

Ok, I'm not going to say that everything is that easy. Improving language
parsing, code completion stuff or autotools requires more knoledge. 
But if you want to improve those, maybe it's time to take a good book
and learn new interesting things;)

> Now, is all this complexity I'm mentioning true ? or there are parts of
> KDevelop and KOffice that are simple and that a newbie developer could help
Yes, there are simple parts (majority of KDevelop parts are not complex)
and there also are simple tasks can be done in complex parts.

> Maybe some interviews could help. 
Hmm, last time interview with KDevelop developers was held in 2002.
It would be good to conduct it in 2004.

-- 
Alexander Dymo
ICST Department, National University of Shipbuilding, Mykolayiv, Ukraine

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