[Uml-devel] Re: karbon/umbrello

[Andrew Sutton]

interesting ideas... good advice david. that idea probably would be a little 
"too high level".

so it sounds like there's a need for a general purpose vector drawing 
framework that works with some kind of painter. this could be used for, say, 
umbrello, kivio, karbon or just about anything that needs to display create 
and display vector graphics. excellent.

i really like the V* object hierarchy... it certainly seems like the right 
direction. even more, i also i like the usage of base objects as interfaces 
for managing certain components of objects. unless i'm completely 
misinterpreting the code, i see a potential problem involving multiple 
inheritance - granted, it can be eliminated via virtual inheritance. the 
other thing might be to introduce QObject as a base of VObject - i know its a 
little heavy, but it does grant signal/slot capabilities to objects in the 
canvas.

there are some KOffice refactoring issues - like eliminating any dependencies 
on KOffice. not that KO is bad, its probably just a little heavy for smaller 
applications to link against and it would be nice to have this as stand alone 
as possible. for this, i think KPainter would be an excellent replacement for 
VKoPainter - they're basically the same thing anyway (built on top of 
libart). we might even be able to package KPainter as the default painter for 
the object hierarchy - that means there wouldn't need to be any massive 
rewriting for karbon (that i can forsee).

the canvas is probably going to be a little harder. i think it might be 
worthwhile to try and provide an abstract canvas interface and then provide a 
default implementation as with KPainter/VPainter stuff i suggested. the same 
should go for VDocument. that provides a lot of interesting opportunities for 
people down the road, should the need arise.

question: if people are serious about proceeding with this, where does it go? 
i'd suggest KPainter, but the name might be a little misleading because we'd 
be providing alot more than just KPainter (and alot less than Karbon :). 
actually, what would be a good name for this thing?

anyway, depending on what my advisor needs me to do for research this summer 
(hopefully not too much), i'm going to have tons of free time starting next 
week. being that i'd love to see this get used for umbrello2 i suppose i'll 
have to do some work getting stuff started... this should be fun :)

andrew sutton
ansutton at kent.edu