Plasma developers wish-list for the QML/JS KDevelop language plugin

[Aleix Pol]

On Sat, Aug 2, 2014 at 4:34 PM, Denis Steckelmacher <steckdenis at yahoo.fr>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> My GSoC project for this year consists of implementing a QML/Javascript
> language plugin for KDevelop. I've worked on the plugin for several months
> and it is starting to be in a usable state. It recognizes the whole QML and
> Javascript syntax and understands many things, like QML module imports,
> directory imports (import "../dir" as MyDir), and even the import of binary
> QML modules installed in $KDE4_LIB_DIR/imports (provided that you have
> "qmlplugindump", "qmlplugindump-qt5" or "qml1plugindump" installed in your
> PATH).
>
> While the plugin may not recognize QML modules installed in unusual
> locations (QML does not provide any standard include path, everything is
> application-specific I think), it may already be useful for some people.
>

For starters, we should get QML plugins to generate automatically the
plugin dump. Those could even be generated by cmake and distributed by
distributions, rather than generated at runtime.

FWIW, I haven't been able to get KDevelop to find one of those imports,
even though qmlscene gets to find them, so there's probably space for
improvement there.


>
> The GSoC coding period ends in two weeks, and during this time, I invite
> those interested to install the plugin (repository: kde:kdev-qmljs, branch
> master, requires KDevelop and KDevPlatform 4.7 or master), to test it and
> to reply to this email (or ping me on #kdevelop, nickname steckdenis) if
> you think that a feature is missing or could be improved. Here is a list of
> the planned features and the reason why they don't already exist:
>
> * Helper widget* for choosing a font family: the plugin is based on Qt4
> that does not offer QtQuick.Controls, so advanced helper widgets are
> impossible to implement for now. The plugin will be ported to Qt5 and KF5
> during the Randa meeting.
> * Helper widget for previewing an animation (and choosing its easing type,
> duration, etc): same reason as above
> * QML previewer: would add a dependency on QtCreator (qmlpuppet is the
> tool, shipped with QtCreator, that allows to preview QML widgets), and
> would be very complicated to implement.
>

That wouldn't help much for plasma, plasmoids need a big infrastructure to
get them running. At the moment the plasmoidviewer is the only way to run a
plasmoid that is not the full plasmashell, and it's quite close to it.


>
> Thanks for any feedback,
> Denis
>
> *Helper widget: if you put your cursor on an QML property like "color:",
> "width:" or "family:", a widget appears in a tool-tip.

This widget can be a color picker, a preview of the font size or family you
> have chosen, etc.
>

I've been using this plugin for months, those helpers look quite cool but
they're not very useful in practice, I've thought of discussing to remove
those. We can discuss that in Randa anyway.

Keep up the good work!

Cheers!
Aleix
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/attachments/20140804/84e986b7/attachment.html>