[Kommander-devel] crazy idea for enhancing OSL?

[Eric Laffoon]

Hi all,
I just got a crazy idea while answering a post on the user list... Integrating 
and synchronizing external scripting within Kommander... How to do it. To 
date we've looked at the problem and assumed there is no practical solution, 
and I don't think we've been unreasonable. But while explaining this ideas 
started to flash in my brain. This may be the residual insanity of sleep 
deprivation and a lot of driving...

The first idea I had was threads. Qt4 will have a better thread model. I'm 
sure at least Andras will consider this a can of worms. ;-) It's not all that 
satisfying as there is not much answered here other than the ability to have 
information on state and enhanced management. Communication might require 
sockets and that means the language would have to support this, but now there 
is a problem in implementation as it may be possible but would not be 
trivial.

Of course if a language is enabled by building it in or making hooks that is 
easy to use but I have not wanted to make Kommander only work for select 
languages. While thinking about this and some of the other things I want to 
do I got an idea... Suppose I want to run a script in Kommander. We've 
discussed passing it arguments and returning a value. What if I want to have 
Kommander ask it for a value, or have it pipe out data from a loop?

One of the things we discussed was text templates like the snippets in Quanta 
that can be used for constructing scripts. What if we were to review and 
construct a set of standard interfaces? The interfaces would have 
functionality in Kommander and would require a counterpart structure in the 
client script. The idea would be that the user could use a template to 
construct their script in Python or Perl or whatever and then use a function 
referencing the script and it's registered variable to interrogate a value 
for instance. Or it could accept a signal from the script to a slot script to 
take an action.

Effectively I'm asking for thoughts on how we might make it possible to enable 
a scripting language to have a tighter interaction and work better with less 
requirement to use the internal scripting. The criteria for this is to make 
it possible for a skilled scripter to write an interface template. 
Alternately, if there might be an easy way create a plugin to offer some 
enhanced functionality I'd be interested in those ideas as well.
-- 
Eric Laffoon
Project Lead - kdewebdev module