[Kommander-devel] Kommander in KOffice

[Eric Laffoon]

On Monday 21 August 2006 7:14 am, Cedric Pasteur wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm the guy who created and designed most parts of KFormDesigner (KFD),
> which is used to design forms in kexi. There was also a standalone version
> (similar to Qt Designer) created, but I'm not sure it still works.
> I already sent a mail on this list two years ago about the possibility to
> reuse KFD in Kommander 2.
>
> KFD development has been very slow for the last past two years, in
> particular because of school which didn't left me a lot of free time.
> However, I think i'll have some free time this year (except in septemeber
> and october) to develop again, and the idea to rewrite kfd to make it
> usable in kommander, together with kross, really motivates me.
>
> We (the Kexi team, mostly jaroslaw staniek, who is the second dev involved
> in kfd, and sebastian sauer, who created kross) already had planned to
> rewrite kfd  in order to use it to also create reports, if this appeared to
> be the best solution (other possible solution was reusing koText).
> So, I think this rewrite could benefit both projects, as weel as other
> projects (Sebastian mentionned amarok guys are interested) which need some
> scripting solution with support for displaying user-created forms. With our
> experience combined, we could avoid many design mistakes, etc.
>
> Sebastian and I are connected to #kexi channel on freenode, so you could
> join us to talk about that.

I'm insanely busy and rarely get to IRC. I end up spending too much time 
chatting. Will you be at aKademy this year? We are very interested in using 
KFD for Kommander. Our thinking has been that it looked like a more workable 
solution and you were very helpful before. We're also moving Quanta to the 
KDevelop framework, so this means that there will be vastly more flexibility 
there and we could move Kommander there as well. Ideally Kommander should 
expose it's text editor more like Quanta for multiple Kommander Text files in 
tabs and then it should enable the GUI design either in another tab or set of 
tabs or floating in another window.

BTW I've talked with Amarok developers before and we like each other's work. I 
think Kommander could be useful to them if they want to use it. One of our 
goals is to try to get the executor moved to kdebase. This would greatly 
benefit users and developers alike. For developers you would have...

1) a ready made graphical tool that speaks native DBUS
2) Users could easily get the editor and make changes or create dialogs if the 
application has hooks in place
3) since Kommander can do i18n and produces extremely small files applications 
can release expanded capabilities elements on a fluid basis
4) using KNewStuff and even using our servers users could assist in quick 
translations

One thing we want to do is to have KNewStuff integration in Kommander where 
opening a dialog asks for resources and if it doesn't find them it asks 
permission to download and install them. This could be made to work with 
translations too.

We're also looking at having language extention libraries that would enable 
native interfaces to DBUS so that a user could opt to use Python, Ruby or 
even Rexx as a replacement for our own internal parser that handles logic 
structure. Perhaps we can brainstorm with Sebastian on that. I do have some 
grand goals so we need to make sure we can deliver on release schedule. 

BTW thanks for joining and posting. I've been thinking about you and KFD but 
I've been insanely busy. Speaking of which... Back to work. ;-)
-- 
Eric Laffoon
Project Lead - kdewebdev module