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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: Listening to KMail over the telephone
From:       Igor Gilitschenski <igi-g () gmx ! net>
Date:       2001-09-23 21:52:38
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On Sat, Sep 22, 2001 at 02:02:30PM -0400, Ellis Whitehead wrote:
> I'm working on conveniently representing data from programs such as kmail, 
> kaddressbook, kdict, knode, knewsticker, etc. in the form of xml, plain text, 
> html, and speech.
This is a very interesting issue. I thought about a possible realisation
of this tasks. And noticed several needs a possible implementation would
face.
A further Idea, which was not mentioned by you, would be a Web based
Desktop. Java could be used to fullfill this.
That is also a point for some questions:
1. Is the KDE to Java Wrapper, executed if you have an Applet or does
   the security Manager of the Browser forbid to execute such things?
2. What about the Libs themselves? Are they able to visualize/exec KDE
   Applications, which are run elsewhere.

Implementing something like this brings a lot of problems. There would
be a need to have a further Implementation of KDELIBS, which is only
responsible for visualization and the GUI, since the whole Destop would
be run on a server. I think companies like Sun might be interested in
supporting this, since they are still selling Appliances :-)

> The process involves querying an interface which returns xml data, and then 
> running this data through libxslt using a certain XSL file, depending on the 
> kind of output we want.
> 
> Some of the fun things this leads to is being able to:
> 	- check your address book via the web while out of town
> 	- check kdict from the console or use the data in another program
> 	- have news items read alout to you while eating breakfast
> 		(e.g. "knewticker --mode=speech | festival --tts")
> 	- hook up a modem interface to listen to email over the phone
Ack. Many of this Ideas require a Service Deamon, which runs on your PC.
The main task of such a deamon would be to provide all the  Information
mentioned by you. I.e. This might be the thing to recieve your phone
calls and reading your mails.

What are your Ideas of a possible implementation?

> My strongest interest at the moment is for accessing local data from 
> a remote browser.  I've written a simple server which makes this possible to 
> an extent.  Example:
> >From konqueror, open: http://localhost:8080/addressbook?lookup=Smith
> The server sees if it has a config entry for 'addressbook'.  In this case, it 
> executes "ab --mode=html --lookup=Smith".  The executable 'ab' then looks up 
> any 'Smith's and returns html output.  The server sends the html back to the 
> client.
This is an interesting solution. What did you use to interchange the
data? Does KDE have an own Interchange format or does it rely on many
existing standarts.

Now let me say some words about your problem of creating kab instances
for every lookup. As you might have noticed my Idea of a possible
solution would be to create a server, which handles it all. It can be
accessed by something like Zope to create a Web Interface or some other
Application server.
If you are not interested in this solution then you moght want to use
an Apache module, which would create one single KAB process for all
queries.

Hoping that my Ideas are not that mad,
Igor

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