porting liquid weather to plasma

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 29 February 2008, Matt wrote:
> I'm the guy who wrote (most of) liquid weather.  

cool =) liquid weather is one of my top 3 fave sk themes.

> Currently it's languishing 
> as a superkaramba theme, as I don't have a lot of time to maintain it, and
> it's a complete kludgy mess.  I'd quite like to start from scratch and
> rewrite it for plasma, but don't quite know where to start.

hopefully we'll be able to help with that. 

> Basically, I only know python (and a very small subset of python at that).
> I've read somewhere that someone's written a weather data engine, but I
> don't know if it hooks into the weather.com xml feed. 

i don't think so, at least it isn't in the build i have. if you run 
plasmaengineexplorer and select the weather engine you'll see the "ions" list 
there (Shawn: should that be renamed to something less implementation 
revealing, such as "Weather Sources" or something?) ... i currently see NOAA, 
EnvCan and BBC's UK Met.

i believe all of those also use XML feeds.

> to parse than scraping websites.  However, it is subject to a license,
> which I don't think is incompatible with plasma, however, maybe
> incompatible with use as a generic data engine for other applets to hook
> into.

Shawn probably knows the details on this one. there's no reason it couldn't be 
provided as an optional plugin people could install, and we may even be able 
to be audacious enough to ship it ourselves but ... iirc it has a no 
commercial usage license? do you (or Shawn?) have a link to the licensing on 
it?

> If I'm to retain a lot of the functionality of liquidweather, I'd like to
> also retain a lot of the configurability of it - I'm not sure what
> facilities plasma provides for configuration dialogs, but hopefully it can
> accommodate my needs.

there are no constraints on these.

> Is there a way to write plasma applets in python yet?  I know that plasma

there is a Python ScriptEngine in playground. there are also javascript and 
webkit based ones.

> can, or will be able to, load superkaramba themes, however, as I say above,

yes, thanks to Sebastian's work it can load them since 4.0.

> liquidweather is currently collapsing under its own weight, and I'd like to
> start anew, and try to take advantage of some of the features of plasma.

makes sense...

> Is there a website that can help to get me started? 

there's an overly neglected introductory tutorial on techbase. 

*gives you a stick* now beat me over the ehad with it about how stupid it is 
that this isn't documented yet and i'll get to it right away

*beating ends*

great. i'll try and make some quiet writing time this weekend.

prior to that, however, there is the techbase tutorial and many, many applets 
in kdebase/workspace/plasma/applets, extragear/plasma/applets and 
playground/base/plasma/applets to look through. they are all c++ though. =/

> Sorry, these quesetions 
> are probably answered somewhere, but I've been away from things for a
> while, and am not fully up to speed with where things are at.

np.. glad to see that you're back around ...

-- 
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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