On Plasmate's previewer

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On March 5, 2010, Yuen Hoe Lim wrote:
> I forgot to raise this in the irc meeting earlier :( I think we should
> consider the possibility of having the previewer as its own separate
> process.

it would be nice. i don't think it's critical for the first release, though. 
please add it to the wiki if you haven't already.

> This is good imo because
> 
> 1) A crashing plasmoid won't bring Plasmate down with it. Currently if a
> plasmoid crashes on-load, every subsequent loading of the project will
> probably also result in a crash (because the previewer automatically loads
> the plasmoid). And that's pretty bad if Plasmate crashes along - the
> project will become unusable.

of course, crashes in the plasmoid should only be coming from the c++ 
underneath ... which also shouldn't happen.

still, it can happen. what i'd suggest for now is not showing the preview by 
default and leaving that up to the developer to start by pressing the preview 
button.

> 2) I think it would be very useful if we could eventually capture (and
> display in some way) the current plasmoid's console output messages, so
> that it's easier for users to debug runtime errors and such. Currently
> those output messages become Plasmate's console output, and I'm not sure
> if there is a way for Plasmate to grab them.

this won't be solved by putting it out of process since it will then get all 
the debug output from all of libplasma when really we probably just want the 
widget output. instead, we should probably have a way to put a print/debug 
shim into the script environment that would get us what we need.

given that plasmate attempts to support python and ruby as well as javascript, 
this is going to be much more difficult than necessary. *sigh*

> But then if the previewer becomes it's own separate process, will it still
> be possible for it to live in a dockwidget?

we could xembed it.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
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