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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Kommander/DCop Qt Designer and Other languages
From:       Andreas Pakulat <apaku () gmx ! de>
Date:       2007-03-26 14:19:41
Message-ID: 20070326141941.GD27979 () morpheus ! apaku ! dnsalias ! org
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On 24.03.07 22:54:56, Andy Mason wrote:
> Is it difficult to add language bindings in general or is it just a
> case that most people in KDE are familiar with C++ and therefore don't
> feel the need to work with other languages ?

I never developed language bindings, but its quite a bit of work. First
you have to wrap Qt itself, then most of kdelibs to get something
usable. I know that for PyQt4, Phil (the author of the bindings) has a
neat little tool that extracts class information from the Qt4 headers
into an XML format which he then uses to autogenerate the bindings. But
still there are various corner-cases where the autogenerated stuff needs
tweaking. Also this is only possible because of the
binding-generate-tool sip that he also developed, which generates the
C-Code for the binding from a textual description (including C++ or
Python fragments where needed). 

The PyKDE bindings for KDE3 were AFAIK done manually and this is quite
some work, looking at the number of releases and how often they occur.
Also the problem here was that the bindings tried to work over several
releases of KDE, so they got more complicated.

I have no idea how hard/easy the Ruby bindings are to maintain, but
given the fact that there exist already Ruby-KDE4 bindings I guess its
easier.

Also note: With Kross in kdelibs for KDE4 it should be really easy for
apps to allow scripting via any language that is supported. Currently I
think JS and Python are supported via Kross, but others can be supported
by implementing a proper Kross-plugin for them (I don't know the
details, IIRC there was a dot article some time ago about Kross -
dot.kde.org).

Andreas

-- 
A tall, dark stranger will have more fun than you.
 
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