Declarative UI Integration, reprise

[Marco Martin]

On Thursday 24 September 2009, Alan Alpert wrote:
> Hello Plasma Devs,
>
> Firstly, I've just written a blog post about the Declarative UI plasma
> integration ( http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/09/24/qt-declarative-ui-
> and-plasma/ ). It explains the vision of Declarative UI, as it relates to
> Plasma, and what we hope to achieve with it. So if you don't know why the
> integration exists you might want to read that first.
just made a quick try

plasmoiditem.h:52: Error: Undefined interface
fixed by including QGraphicsLayoutItem

then launching the kineticweather plasmoid the layout and the animations kinda 
work, but instead of the current condition it says 
TypeError:result of expression near '....' [undefined is not an object]


> Thanks for the feedback you gave on the initial Declarative UI plasma
> integration. Between addressing that and a lot of internal feedback an
> awful lot has changed in Declarative UI since then. I've tried to update
> the plasma integration to the modern day, and also cleaned it up a little.
> I think that all the concerns from your previous feedback have been
> addressed (please correct me if I'm wrong) so I'd like any more
> constructive criticism you have. I'll just enumerate some of the key
> changes since last time:
>
> -Declarative UI is using Graphics View, which simplifies the integration
> -Has a simple implementation of exposing the Plasma Widgets in QML (look at
> the examples that have 'Plasma.PushButton { ... }', like picture.qml)
> -Names of most elements have changed, and you need import statements to get
> any items at all.
>
> After one round of changing everything, we're in a more stable period so
> now's a good time to play with the technology. I'm hoping that by now it is
> close enough that you can use it to write plasmoids fine - with the caveat
> that you still need the declarative UI version of Qt (we still haven't
> merged into mainline Qt). It has the viewer plasmoid and QML script engine
> like before, but also has a KineticApplet class that you can subclass, to
> write a C++ applet with a Declarative UI front end (and thus still have a
> conventional settings dialog). The examples are still about the same,
> you'll have noticed by now that I have little in the way of design talent
> to spruce them up. A picture.qml example has been added, all it does is
> show using plasma widgets and animation in a slightly less useless way than
> the widgets.qml.
>
> I've noticed the discussion about JS bindings for plasma, my interpretation
> is that these allow you to write imperative JS code to setup a
> QGraphicsWidget in the standard imperative way, including writing an
> imperative painting function. If so then there's no problematic overlap,
> it's just another binding language but please correct me if I'm wrong.
> Mixing imperative with declarative gets confusing easily and needs to be
> handled carefully so I'd rather avoid mixing JS bindings and QML at this
> point. I suspect it would be easy to do, but hard to do well.
>
> I welcome feedback, or any suggestions on how this can be made more useful
> for Plasma. In particular I'd welcome feedback on how we're integrating
> with existing code. I'm hopeful that we can integrate existing items
> without having to re-write anything at all (like the integration currently
> does), without compromising the usefulness of the integration.


-- 
Marco Martin