Dataengine Questions, Proposal?

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday 22 January 2009, David Baron wrote:
> Register the applet with it/for it?

applets don't register with the engine, really. they just ask for it:

	dataEngine("akonadi")

you are guaranteed a valid engine in return. if an engine responding to the 
name "akonadi" exists, you'll get that. if none exists, you'll get a "dummy" 
engine. from there you can freely connect to sources, request services, etc.

> What datasource do I get? Obviously this is not a polled item and
> getDataSource should trigger the signal.

this one i'll leave to sebas :)

> Is there or will/can there be a dataengine sitting on X-events such as
> keystrokes and mouse-events. This would obviously trigger quite often if
> one is using these devices. Keyboard and mouse event classes are altready
> defined in qt and would also carry the window handle that "owns" the event.

we have a mouse movement engine, which is useful because that requires polling 
the global mouse pointer. i'm not sure what the purpose of a keys and mouse 
press engine would be though ....

> LIve spell-checkers a la Kisa, instant translation, instant search to
> recoll/beagle, google, answers.com, etc.In an opensource rather than
> proprietary maner.

so sort of like an always-running-krunner-query. :)

hm... the challenge with live spell checking and translations isn't really 
getting the input, but being able to place the output back into the app. given 
the pervasive support of spell checking in kde and other popular F/OSS apps, 
i'm not sure there is nearly the same benefit for us with such a thing as 
there is for proprietary systems.

instant search, etc .. that gets expensive fast. i'd rather see a way to tie 
into krunner for those.

> There is a color-picker plasmoid and gimp and other apps take choose screen
> areas using the mouse. What I want to do is retrieve the word under/around
> the cursor with a key-shortcut and feed that to a search engine,
> translation engine etc.

i think that would be very difficult to do i part due to there being no 
"standard" toolkit, resulting in the need for a lot of hackish "what is that 
thing under the cursor?" type code. instead, you could use the x clipboard and 
require that the user highight with the mouse. then you can just grab the 
selection from x (very straightforward task) and go from there.

no need for keyboard or mouse events, no need for figuring out what's beneath 
the mouse, etc.

> (Kisa simply sits on keystrokes, wherever they are as assembles words as
> typed.)

that's also how our spell checkers work, except they cooperate with the apps 
directly and are baked into the libraries so apps get this for free.

-- 
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 Qt Software

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