plasmate:questions about coding

[Sam S.]

Hi,

I hope it's okay if I drop in on the discussion.

Being a KDE enthusiast but not much of a C++ programmer, I'm quite
interested in using QML for creating KDE plasmoids. So apart from
reading up on QML documentation, I also downloaded plasmate from git
and gave it a try (and am actually using it now for creating my first
QML plasmoid).

Here are my thoughts:

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 1:54 PM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> i really would like to keep that first screen's UI clean. is it really
> necessary to be able to clear projects if there are only four or less? maybe
> not.

I actually do think that having an easy way to delete a project from
that list (and from disk) would be nice.

For example, just because you open an existing plasmoid from
GetHotNewStuff _once_ (to look at it's code), doesn't mean you always
want it to "stick in your face" from now on every time you start
plasmate... ;-)

What's wrong with the context-menu solution you mentioned above?
Or a hovering "delete" tool button on each list entry (maybe only
visible while the mouse is over the respective list item)?

Oh and while I'm at it, the other function I felt was missing was a
way to close the current project and get back to the start page,
without quitting plasmate and re-starting it. (Maybe a simple "File >
Close" menu entry?)
And of course support for data engines, which doesn't seem implemented
yet (when I try to create on, plasmate crashes).

All in all, however, plasmate is a pretty useful tool already, even if
it's not yet finished. Thanks for creating it, it really makes it much
easier for someone like me to get started with plasmoid development!

>> Also,in the near future we must decide if we want plasmate to support only
>> QML or other bindings as well.A lot of the TODOs and FIXMEs are related
>> with the bindings.
>
> yes, this is something i want to discuss wiht people at Tokamak 5 next week
> and come to a decision on. do you (or others :) have any opinions on this?

You're just talking about plasmoids, right? Not also about data engines?

While QML+JavaScript seems to be an awesome combination, I can still
see reasons why one might sometimes use Python or Ruby - either
directly for the plasmoid code, or at least in the form of a data
engine:

 - plasmoids that want to make use of external libraries which are
only available in Python (in fact the plasmoid I'm trying to create is
of this type, although I'm using QML and plan to create a Python data
engine for communicating with the external library)

 - plasmoids that require complex non-UI logic for which JavaScript is
either not well suited, or not preferred by the developer (JavaScript
just doesn't make it easy to keep large chunks of code clean and
reusable, and provides less convenience features than e.g. Python)

Cheers,

  Sam