[Uml-devel] karbon/umbrello

[Andrew Sutton]

this is mainly for rob, since he's been in on some of this discussion before, 
but i thought i'd use this as a nice opportunity to get some other ideas.

i'm resurrecting a discussion from about a month ago where i'd decided that 
the next version of umbrello (the uml app in kdesdk), needed a much nicer 
drawing framework than, say, a standard canvas. i've been over alot of 
different possibilities, but ended up with karbon as the drawing framework. 
it seems to be capable of everything we need it to be capable of.

i'm finally at a point where i can start prototyping the diagramming stuff, 
but had some technical questions that i haven't been able to easily resolve. 
umbrello is not a koffice application. it looks like the constructors for the 
koffice parts (KarbonPart in particular) seems to require a fair bit of the 
koffice framework in order to instantiate the part - which i don't think i 
can provide. that said, is it possible, then to reuse a koffice part in an 
application that doesn't support koffice? or am i just dreaming?

if its not possible to do this, the other option would be to use the V* 
frameworks in karbon's core and supporting libs. unfortunately, the makefile 
doesn't really include these for installation. moreover, i don't think the 
core is really meant to be a standalone development environment. iirc, there 
was some talk about refactoring karbon's core to provide something like that. 
i'm hoping there is because i don't really feel like trying to make umbrello 
a koffice app just yet. this _is_ my first qt/kde program :)

so... hopefully somebody knows how i can go about doing this - or at least 
some hints.

andrew sutton
ansutton at kent.edu