David’s talk KDE Development dealt with new features in KDE 3.2.

He introduced the audience to application scripting via DCOP which allows for inter-process ommunication between KDE applications. KDcop is a useful GUI to inspect running applications and processes. DCOP has bindings to many languages (also PHP?) and usually works on the local machine only, but can be enabled ot work over the network, but this feature is disabled by default

KTrader handles “service types” and associates applications and mimetypes, taking into account the user profile. I thought to myself that we should think of a trader within CONESYS that deals with DDO packages and associates those packages with a certain repository.

KParts is there to load application components in the manner of

KParts::ComponentFactory::createPartInstanceFromQuery[…]

, which is a new approach compared to older KDE versions, much shorter.

Something you can easily try out yourself is KDialog which displays a KDE dialog similar to a JavaScript alert(). A sample:

>kdialog –yesno “Run this script?” || exit 1

With KDialog, e.g. shell scripts can ask for user input.

KOffice is currently in the phase of transition to a XML based native format as defined by the OASIS office committee. This process (which is in the beginning) will provide simple interoperability between OpenOffice and KOffice. I noticed that KOffice has a flow chart application called Kivio which I will try out at home 🙂

Some notes on Konqueror: it will allow for sidebar modules a la mozilla and inline spell-checking. Also, it will be possible to integrate applications like umbrello to display UML diagrams.

The next KDE meeting will be the first one open to the public. Up to now, the meetings were only meant for KDE developers. From my point of view, this is a very important and the right step ahead to also include the users at meetings when developing an FOSS Desktop system. The often perceived dichotomy between developers and users must be bridged, as has also been discussed at this years OSCOM conference concerning Content Management Systems.