About pastebin applet

[Artur Souza (MoRpHeUz)]

Hello all,

I've been thinking about a nice way to improve the current pastebin applet and 
it's dataengine/service. So I'll share my ideas with you and you can say 
whatever comes to your mind :)

First of all, pastebin started as a plasmoid to just post text on pastebin.ca 
service. Willing to allow more than one server and at the same time don't 
change it tooooo much (what actually happened looking backwards) I went to a 
simple and not elegant solution but that actually solved the issue and Sebas 
even gave some love to the UI to look better. Imagebin support came easily 
after this.

However, besides have been elected one of the top plasmoid by linux magazine it 
actually sucks in terms of architecture. Last tokamak while one compilation or 
another of KDE for the mysterious device(TM) I tried to create a 
dataengine/service from the plasmoid code to make it better and even allow 
other plasmoids to make use of the service itself.

Currently, in order to expand it making it support more services (each user on 
Earth seems to have it's preferred service) is painful. Most of the imagebin 
services are duplicating the http POST code got from KIPI plugins source code 
and to enable more services we need to recompile the whole thing and the 
support comes out on next KDE release.

Here comes the new idea: rewrite it to be based on plugins (easily achievable) 
and change it's name to something more user friendly like "Share It!" or 
something else.

Motivation: based on simple plugins we can provide stuff like GHNS for new 
services making it easier to expand it, rewrite the plasmoid code to use the 
new QStateMachine as it's basically a state machine, fix the dataengine/service 
code to provide one function for http POST based services so the plugins 
doesn't need to actually duplicate code and even make it work on different to 
avoid bugs of people pasting too much content at once (there is this bug where 
the user posted by mistake(?) a 12MB file and it froze plasma).

Another clear motivation is how user friendly "Pastebin" is ? It's more of a 
share tool and people that actually don't know what pastebin means looses a 
good chance/tool to share their stuff. It would even make sense to create 
plugins for flickr and picasa for example (maybe using the already present KIPI 
plugins for that).

So, what do you think ? Pastebin turns into "Share It!" with a better 
architecture.

/me waiting for the "no"'s and "don't"'s now :)

Cheers,

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Artur Duque de Souza
openBossa
INdT - Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia
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Blog: http://blog.morpheuz.cc
PGP: 0xDBEEAAC3 @ wwwkeys.pgp.net
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