[Panel-devel] Scripting

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday 10 September 2007, Petri Damsten wrote:
> What's the status with scripting support? There are some applets in
> playground (rb, js). There are plasma dirs under kdebindings ruby and
> smoke. And in plasma libs there is ScriptEngine which is not (yet) used
> anywhere?

that's the "bit" that's left to do: take the experiments and make them into 
ScriptEngines ...

>  so I could port SuperKaramba themes

AFAIK this wouldn't require python per say; i know people are all hot about 
being able to write applets in ruby and python and $NAME_YOUR_PET_LANGUAGE, 
but that's not a really practical POV. most basically: it's going to make 
things suck for the user. (but then, when did we care about them, right? ;)

it would be much more interesting to see JS applets.

> - rss engine for news

libsyndicate in kdepimlibs makes this very easy. i used it for the cia.vc 
engine and it works like a charm. of course, there's only C++ access to it 
right now, so some sort of bridge would be needed unless there is a 
language-native alternative.

> - html/rich text widget to show news

we have rich text and basic html, but complex html is pending either someone 
throwing a bunch of love into khtml to get it rendering to the canvas or 
QtWebkit getting to the point where we can wrap that.

> - custom engines (python)

i'm really on the fence with non-c++ engines. i can see the benefit of 
portability, but that's about it tbh. i'm not keen on the overhead python 
brings with it.

> or if it's specific to one applet only should it 
> be just included in the applet and not use any dataengine?

depends. splitting out into an engine means that multiple instances of the 
same applet get to share the data resources and it allows for new applets to 
incorporate that same data quite easily as well. if it's truly trivial or 
highly specific to the applet, perhaps an engine isn't absolutely necessary, 
but it does make things a lot nicer down the line and it's really not much 
(if any) more work.

> - There seems to be SignalPlotter (Graph in SK) but not anything like bar
> in SK .

yes, we don't have such a widget yet. shouldn't be hard though =)

> - In plasma most of the applets could be resized easily so support for
> common resizing (like Resize option in normal windows) would be nice.

this is already on the Tasks list for some time.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
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