Hi Plasma devs, Those of you following Qt Labs closely will have heard about Qt Kinetic's Declarative UI http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/05/13/qt-declarative-ui/ . As Declarative UI is targeted towards enhancing the same sorts of applications as Plasma, plasma integration is a good real-world fit. So we've throw something together (it's in playground/base/plasma/kinetic-declarative) and hope that it might be useful in your plans to add Netbook and media center components; declarative UI is designed to help create embedded device style UIs! The Plasma integration we've done allows plasmoids to be written exclusively in QML, or in conjunction with C++. I'll let the blog posting handle all the riveting details on Declarative UI itself, and focus on providing more technical details about the plasma integration we've done.
Firstly the suggested plan for the plasma integration is that it lives in playground and is not intended for general use until Qt Declarative stabilizes. Where it goes in terms of technical improvements is unknown; but we'd love to see what people do with it. So far it's not complete, but provides a good glimpse of how Declarative UI could benefit a project like Plasma. Gaps in the integration that we're aware of include setting the background hint from QML, using plasma widgets from QML and refactoring the QML frontend part of the kinetic plasmoid into a library class you can just inherit from and call setQml() on. If you checkout the plasma integration repository you'll find that it provides a script engine that can run packages comprised of QML files, a plasmoid that acts like the qmlviewer program and an example of an applet written in C++ that draws on a QML file for its fluid UI. There is also a file explaining how to use plasma features like the data engines and theme easily in your QML files, along with the standard QML described in the labs post. You need only the Qt Kinetic Declarative UI repository and KDE trunk as recent as 4.3 beta 1 (r964546) and you can add Declaratively styled plasmoids to your desktop. The attached screenshot shows my desktop covered in QML plasmoids, although the animation doesn't get conveyed well in pictures. The plasmoids to the left are the plasma-integration examples, and the plasmoids to the right are examples for just regular Qt Declarative. Sadly I'm not technically competent in graphic design and so the plasma integration repository contains a dearth of compelling examples. But on the plus side it's easy to run any of the Declarative UI examples as simple plasmoids if you really like them. Note that the examples in the screenshot that weren't designed as plasmoids have had minor changes (set 'clip: true' on the root item and remove any opaque background image) to make them fit in better. There is only one good example in the plasma integration repository, a weather plasmoid. Because there's only one, it has been a little warped so that it can be used in a variety of different ways (you can run it as an applet, as a non-applet C++, through the script engine and through the kinetic plasmoid). Despite this the weather example is still a surprisingly small amount of code to get a fairly fluid visualization of the weather data engine. And that 'code' does not need to include C++ (although the weather data engine is not designed to be set up declaratively). If even I can make something that looks decent I can't wait to see what actual designers do with it. Qt Kinetic Declarative UI is still under development and not ready for general use, the plasma integration doubly so. However, we'd love for you to play around with it and tell us your thoughts. This will help us improve Declarative UI even further before release. -- Alan Alpert Software Engineer Nokia, Qt Software _______________________________________________ Plasma-devel mailing list Plasma-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
