[Kst] Collaboration between kst and scidavis/labplot

[Alexander Semke]

Hello everybody,

first of all - sorry for the big delay in responding to the last post of 
Nicolas. Thank you Nicolas for giving interesting insights into the past and 
into the current state of your project.

I'll try revive the discussion buy just commenting some of Nicolas' 
ideas/remarks.
Since we have very common goals and we mostly agree in all points, I'll only 
comment on those parts of the post, that should/can be clarified.

> Very similar to the data manager in kst2, which contrarily to what you
> think lists more or less all types of objects. In kst 1.x we also had a
> view manager listing view objects (plots, curves, annotation objects iirc,
> ...) which we could possibly reactivate. But I won't comment more on that
> point, as I'm not sure I completely understand what you mean.
Yes, I also meant all the objects in the "worksheet" - plots, curves etc.

> I think I agree there, even though I don't exactly know what you mean by
> model/view. We also use it. But the project explorer is interesting
> thinking about.
By model/view I meant the following design pattern:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93controller
http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest/model-view-programming.html


> I don't either know exactly how cooperation could look like, probably
> anything from sharing backend-code to a complete merge, depending on good
> will, time, motivation, workflows, etc...
I think, the merge of both projects is not an option, since nobody of us 
will be ready to completely give up the own project. Since there was no 
response from kst's developers I conclude that there is no real interest in 
our code. The possible collaboration can consist of sharing of ideas or just 
of looking into the foreign code to get some ideas, inspirations or solutions 
of own problems. The sharing of the code is more problematic, since the code 
basis in the backends is quite different.

You mentioned the kipi-plugins and the idea of having some common frameworks 
that can be used in plotting programs. There is already something that can 
probably be used in projects we're working on:
http://www.koffice.org/developer/apidocs/libs-flake/index.html

I didn't manage to find the time to understand this framework in all the 
details. But I've got a sketchy overview of it and I think, that it'll be 
possible to combine the current labplot code with the flake interface. The 
painting is impelemented as in the current code and in addition the flake 
interface is put onto it and supported throughout the software. Having this, 
it should be possible to import flakes from other programms. 
For example, I would very appreciate the possibility of having a set of 
Feynman diagrams in some of koffice-programms (this would make programms like 
JaxoDraw obsolete for KDE-users) or some other vector objects und to 
import/use them in labplot.

I stopped working on the plotting stuff until I find more time to look at 
flakes.

Also, it was planned to provide in labplot a high degree of interactivity like 
in other vector graphic programms (e.g. like in karbon). This part turned to 
be more complicated as I thought before and I postponed this job. A brief look 
into the karbon's code was not very enlightening (say, I was not able to 
understand everything within 20 minutes). 
What are the plans for kst? Will such a degree of interactivity be implemented 
at some point?

The idea of having common frameworks for plugins, scripting stuff etc. would 
require a big amount of discussions and adjustments in the backends...


Best regards
Alexander


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