[RkWard-devel] RKWard development docs online

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi David!

I've just finished reading your report. I don't think I've understood much of 
the details, but certainly I've found some fairly interesting concepts. 
Especially the "everything is a plugin" approach is certainly quite cool and 
far more generic than the plugins I have thought of so far. For instance 
having plugins that provide import/export filters for certain file-types is 
something that simply had not occured to me, but should be fairly easy to 
integrate.
Another cool thing is having plugins for the data-editor(s). The main issue 
here, that I don't really understand, how you solved it, is, how the data is 
being passed here.

> The trick here is that each plugin is actually  a full
> mini-application which just takes advantage of the micro-framework of the
> app to integrate nicely.

Could you try to give a rough sketch of how exactly those plugins can operate 
on the same data? I mean, the plugins I have so far don't do anything but 
generate R-syntax. They need to know very little about the rest of the 
application. The only point here, is that they use the same list of available 
objects (which is taken care of in the varselector).
But how exactly does this kind of data-sharing work for the "full 
mini-applications"? How does a data-editor plugin transfer the data back and 
forth?

On a related matter, do you happen to know more about embedding Python I 
C++/Qt? I'm currently thinking about whether it would be possible to 
basically write some (dynamic/plugin-like) widgets in pyQt and embed those 
inside the main application. If something like this would be available, it 
should be somehow possible to - for example - create a pyQt-widget which 
derives from RKEditor and use that as an editor for certain types of data? 
Would such a widget "live" in the same event loop as the rest of the GUI?

Well, I don't know much at all about pyQt or python in general, but I'd like 
to get an idea of what would be possible and how hard it would be to 
integrate. Could you give me some pointers?

Thomas