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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Kicker applet embedding.....was (New qt copy?)
From:       Graham TerMarsch <gtermars () home ! com>
Date:       2000-02-17 17:53:11
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Matthias Ettrich wrote:
> Seriously, we need a decision regarding applets. I really like the dlopen stuff
> and wonder whether it wouldn't be appropriate to use it for all applets. An
> applet then would simply be a library and a small loader. The loader talks to
> kicker via dcop and lets kicker load the library and thus embed the applet.
> This way applets still can show up in the K-menu and still can simply be
> started with konqueror by clicking on them. If the loader can't talk to kicker,
> it will fire up the applet itself.

As my own two cents, I'd like to see both options possible; external and
dlopen'd applets.  We've already had some discussion about the potential
problems with misbehaved applets taking all of kicker down with them and
that that wasn't a preferable option.  But, if the ability was present
for users to somehow denote some applets as being dlopen'd and others
being external processes, I think that'd be an ideal situation.  For
developing new applets it'd mean that I don't have to restart kicker
each time I want to test out a new version of the applet as I could just
it as an external process.  For users it also gives us the advantage of
lower memory overhead as there aren't always dozens of processes running
for each of the applets that are to be shown.

As for how to pull this off, I honestly hae to say that I don't know how
to build it.  I envision something though that has all of the applets as
shared libraries and some sort of applet loader that starts up in a
separate process but still allows the applets to be embedded within
kicker (as they are now).

For the "how do we get the user to denote dlopen/external" part, I'd
(IMHO) see this as being something that's the responsibility of a
kcmkicker module (or something like that).  It'd show a list of applets
that the user could fire up to run within kicker, and each one could
have a check box next to it for "external process".  Being that all of
the applets should have some sort of .desktop file to begin with, I
wouldn't think it too hard to query the bunch to find out which ones are
actually kicker-embeddable.

Hey, it's a wish list....:)

Which reminds me while I'm thinking about it.....a while back I'd posted
some images regarding an embeddable clock and sysinfo applet.  I've got
them both to a point know where they're at least somewhat stable enough
to be considered ready for release to the rest of the KDE world for
feedback (although I wouldn't yet sick them on the masses yet).  Where
would be the best place to make these available?  As well, for the clock
applet I've managed to manually convert a number of "asclock" themes for
use within the clock; does anyone forsee licensing issues arising from
the use of these themes that come externally to asclock itself?

-- 
Graham TerMarsch

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