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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Scripting in KDE
From:       Phil Thompson <phil () river-bank ! demon ! co ! uk>
Date:       2001-01-07 11:23:16
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phlip wrote:
> 
> On Saturday 06 January 2001 22:33, Pavel Troller wrote:
> > Hi!
> >   Yes, I think that KDE needs some strong scripting facility.
> >
> > > As for a scripting language it would be a good idea to keep the options
> > > open, so for example a user could write a scrpt in php, perl, basic or
> > > whatever, but to also use the standard scripting commands and app
> > > scripting commands that could be parsed by the meta compiler.
> >
> > Let me express my opinion about a good language: As a former Amiga fan, I
> > remember the Rexx language. It was ported from IBM mainframes and as a main
> > advantage, it allowed to communicate with apps, pass data to them, read
> > results etc. Every better Amiga app had an ARexx interface.
> >   I wonder if there is a possibility to implement Rexx here - I saw some
> > publicly available sources on the net but they were useless because there
> > is no Rexx interface on Unix apps available. However, KDE has dcop and it
> > offers de facto the same functionality. Rexx's main goal would be to use
> > dcop to fullfill its integration and communication features.
> >   Any ideas about that ?
> 
> REXX's facilities were decades ahead of their time, but the linguistics was
> decades behind. Others just might possibly disagree (and, yes, everyone
> remembers their first Amiga) thus I left all your text in.
> 
> However, to get both advanced facilities and advanced linguistics, what's
> wrong with Python by way of pyKDE?
> 
> I remind the group that MS tried to make a grab for the mindshare last
> millenium by pushing scripting languages thru their "language agnostic"
> ActiveX system, where objects written in any language publish their abilities
> to an ORB, and scripting systems subscribe from any language to the ORB to
> drive these facilities. _That's_ what REXX meant to users: One Script to Rule
> them all and in the Darkness Bind them.
> 
> We got all the pieces in KDE for a language-agnostic ORB now, right?
> 
> (Caveat - I am _just_ about to compile pyKDE and investigate it here...;)

Speaking as the author of PyKDE, I don't think it's suitable for this
purpose. There is a difference between "user scripting" where a
non-programmer is trying get an application to solve a very specific
local problem and "developer scripting" where a programmer is
implementing part of an application. The KDE/Qt APIs are very nice for
the application developer, but far too complicated for a user. PyKDE is
intended to be used by developers, not users. The other problem (at the
moment) is that it is KDE 1.x, not 2.x.

This is why I and theKompany.com developed VeePee and intend to use it
to script enable all of theKompany.com's applications. VeePee gives the
user the ability to create simple GUI interfaces with very few lines of
Python code - it allows the user to get on with solving their specific
problem rather than spend most of their time/code creating the user
interface. VeePee gives the application developer a simple API that
present the Python interpreter as a sub-class of QObject. VeePee also
has a GNOME implementation so that the same user script will create a
GNOME GUI in a GNOME application and a KDE GUI in a KDE application.

The web site is http://www.thekompany.com/projects/vp.

Phil
 
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