[Panel-devel] Containment

[Robert Knight]

> i'll be committing the results tomorrow (Sunday) sometime

Can you post the patches before then.  I have questions but looking at
the API might answer them.

Regards,
Robert.

On 16/09/2007, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> hello...
>
> so i'm mostly done with a fairly important addition / reworking of how
> applets
> are managed. we needed the following things:
>
> - something to paint backgrounds
> 	- needs to support different mimetypes
> 	- needs to be interactive, at least optionally
> 	- needs to support things like animation
> - something to contain applets
> 	- zooming requires grouping
> 	- sharing a corona also requires grouping
> 	- groups manage applet layout and constraints (e.g. FormFactor) stuff
>
> it occurred to me that this essentially describes an Applet, plus some
> additional features. so that's what i've done and called the result
> Containment. we now have a Plasma/Containment ServiceType for this, but it
> really is just an Applet.
>
> loading/saving of applets is still done from a single KConfig object and in
> a
> single pass; a containment per-screen is created ...
>
> the reason things aren't committed atm is that this breaks the current panel
> implementation pretty nicely ;) and i need to rework DesktopView now.
> essentially the view becomes even *less* important, with background painting
> and context menus being handled by Containments.
>
> the ramifications of this are fairly extensive:
>
> - we can share a Corona between multiple screens and panels
> - we can have really frigging cool backgrounds =)
> - it doesn't really introduce much more code complexity at all, as it's
> mostly
> just moving things around a bit and reworking how things get put together
> - the people writing the Desktop plasmoid will love me, because now they
> create their desktop as a Container if they wish and make all their items
> children of itself. this is even nicer than the "no top level" approach.
> whee.
> - applets can be backgrounds as well, which could be pretty interesting
>
> there is exactly one new class in all of this: Containment. it looks a lot
> like a mashup between Corona, DesktopView and Applet. Corona and DesktopView
> both get a bit simpler in the process.
>
> i'll be committing the results tomorrow (Sunday) sometime, but thought i'd
> give everyone a heads-up on this in case there were questions/concerns in
> the
> process.
>
> --
> 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
>