Does anyone know REXX (OS/2 or Amiga) or AppleScript? Applications can be very powerful, but they won't ever be perfect for the needs of advanced users. No one ever has managed to make an application perfectly suitable for any purpose, instead applications are getting bulky, more features are added at every new release and the user just gets confused with all the features that he/she doesn't really need. The solution to this could be a scripting system similar to REXX. Applications are obliged to put up an IPC port that other applications and scripts can send commands to. There should be a basic set of commands that has to be understood by every KDE application, such as minimize, restore, maximize, trigger menu items, stick, unstick, close ... Additionally, applications could allow for inserting new menu items, trigger special functions, present data to the script or accept data from it, and so on. With this, an e-mail program could for example be enhanced by PGP functionality even if this is not explicitly implemented. If the e-mail program supported commands for presenting a special mail to a script (e.g. return the filename...), advanced filtering options could be implemented. Applications could be linked together to a powerful System without having to use large and bulky killer executables. Things like Netscape Communicator are completely obsolete with IPC Scripts. If You received a HTML-email with Your ordinary e-mail client, You could automatically launch a Browser to view it, if the message was in RTF-Format, You could bring up a word processor or other viewer for this file format. Graphics Programs could automatically generate graphics from raw data received from a different application, such as a spreadsheet. Word processors could be automatized to generate e-mail, letters, faxes or whatever from data obtained from a web robot or something similar. And all of this can be done transparently to the user. Implementation of this will of course affect all present kde applications, including kwm, kdm, kfm ... You could use Perl for this purpose. A C/C++ shared library can provide the functionality for the IPC system such as putting up the port, waiting for messages and parsing the commands. Applications could see the issuing of a command to its port like a menu, widget or other input message. The basic features (like minimize, maximize and so on) could be provided by the window manager, so that the application programmers won't have to care about this. In perl, there could be a perl library that maintains a list of all available ports (i.e. running kde applications) from which a script can obtain a special port by its name, which has to be documented with the application. The valid commands for this application will also have to be documented. You could then use that port as an object and call the valid commands and data structures as its members. This system will also be quite easy to understand even for unexperienced users. IMHO, straight use of this feature will be a great improvement, because You are not forced to write huge applications that fit any purpose nor provide thousands of perl libraries. Applications themselves will act as libraries, and user interaction is always possible. I'm quite new to kde, but I'd like to do some programming on it and maybe I'll get something like the above to work. However, there has to be an addition to the style guide if this really should have some perspective for the future. And first, I need some information about application programming for kde itself. Where can I get this? Any programmers interested in this?