JS Scriptengine in libplasma

[Leonardo Franchi]

On Thursday 07 May 2009 11:48:48 Richard Dale wrote:
> On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 8:59 PM, Leonardo Franchi <lfranchi at kde.org> wrote:
> > hola folks,
> >
> > so i'm (finally) looking into adding scripted applet/dataengine support
> > to amarok. it's really easy and transparent and all of that (yay plasma!)
> > but we have a minor issue. we depend only on kdelibs, and the
> > scriptengines are in kdebase/workspace.
> >
> > i understand that most of them have external deps, which may be
> > undesirable. Indeed, we'll most likely restrict all applets/engines to
> > being javascript, so as to not require the user to install random
> > *-bindings package. But moving the javascript dataengine to the plasma in
> >  kdelibs would really be nice.
>
> I agree that the python and ruby script engine bindings have more
> dependency problems than QScript bindings, and it wouldn't make sense
> to put them in kdelibs.
>
> However, on the other hand, the python and ruby ones are not really
> equivalent to the QScript bindings in kdebase as they pretty much
> cover the entire C++ Plasma Applet api, whereas the QScript one covers
> a simpler minimal api. At one time, in the kde playground module,
> there was work going on into developing some more complete JavaScript
> bindings based on the QtJambi parser/code generator. So I wonder if
> anyone is intending to develop the more complex bindings further? Have
> we had enough feedback yet to know whether or not the simpler bindings
> are sufficient for what most people want to do?

Ah, I wasn't aware that the JS bindings aren't "full" bindings like the Ruby 
or Python ones. In amarok 2 we decided to limit all scripts two 
javascript/qtscript in order to a) avoid the mess of having scripts require 
certain *-qt4/kde4 bindings, which lead to users not being able to install 
them, and b) with the qtscriptgenerator bindings we get "for free" a full set 
of qt bindings. We then expose an additional qtscript API for amarok. 

We will most  likely limit scripted amarok applets to qtscript as well. What 
sort of limitations do the JS bindings have?

leo
-----
lfranchi at kde.org		Tufts  University 2010
leonardo.franchi at tufts.edu                 The KDE Project