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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: xpart state and ReadWrite xpart
From:       Lars Knoll <lars () trolltech ! com>
Date:       2001-01-30 10:11:36
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Hi,

On Monday 29 January 2001 22:22, Philippe Fremy wrote:
> I'm working on making a KPart from kvim. Currently, kvim
> (http://aquila.rezel.enst.fr/vim) is only a port of the gtk stuff of gvim
> to Qt, so basically an application.
>
> But it works in an horrible way since it uses its own event loop and only
> gives some times to the gui to process its events when waiting for
> characters (using kapp->processEvents).
>
> Discussing with the author confirm that this won't change. There is no way
> to get rid of the vim event-loop, and in fact, there is no such thing as a
> vim event loop. Vim processes every command in a different place depending
> on what the command is. So turning this into a
> call_to_process_keyboard_entry() api is not possible at all.
>
> So, it looks like it is not possible to make a kpart from this. After my
> first disappointment, I suddenly remember to have read about out-of-process
> embedding, this was ... (ta da dam) .. Xpart!!!

Wow. Someone found a good reason to use it :)

> Reading the white-paper again
> (http://trolls.troll.no/~lars/xparts/doc/xparts.html), this seem to be the
> exact solution to my problem. I had to dig deeply into cvs to finally find
> that it was hidden down in kdebindings.
>
> I had a first look that brings a lot of questions:
> - how usable is it ? stability, gtk or mozilla dependency ?

Currently, the only xpart implemented uses gtk. If you don't want to 
reimplement all of the dcop and xpart stuff already done, you'll have to use 
either gtk or KDE. If you can write your external part using KDE/Qt (which I 
doubt according to your description), it would be very easy, as dcopidl could 
do 90% of the work for you. 

Anyway, the gtk bindings are not what I'd call finished. They work, but some 
stuff is still unimplemented, and you'll need to invest some work there. The 
things that work are however reasonably stable.

> - is there more documentation available ? The white-paper is quite short
> and the source code doesn't look very documented (not documented at all in
> fact). I guess I'll have to go with that.

I'm afraid, yes. But you can ask me questions if you have some (probably 
Simon will also be happy to answer questions about the dcopc bindings).

> - my first goal is to make a ReadOnly component from kvim, but my second
> goal is to make a ReadWrite component, and ultimately a TextEditor
> component. How do you think this will integreate with XPart ? For the
> moment, there is only read only xpart, right ?

Yes. But it could be extended to also include the editorinterface of kparts. 
That would be quite some work in the end, but feel free to work on it. At the 
moment the code is more or less unmaintained, as the people who originally 
did the work seem to be busy with other things.

Cheers,
Lars

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