KDE: Breaking the Network Barrier

comforteagle writes "In this month's KDE: From the Source, entitled Breaking the Network Barrier George Staikos takes us on a walk-through of KDE's desktop networking protocol handlers in the vein of sftp:// webdav:// and a few really nifty ones I wasn't aware of like info:/ perldoc:/ and tar:/. The entire KDE desktop environment is decked out like this, and as George puts it, 'Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X have a long way to go to catch up with the robust, transparent functionality that KDE has provided since version 2.0.'"

Comments

Re:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA... This has nothing to do with which application to launch to deal with a specific file. You are thinking of file associations.

The KDE feature discussed here is a compatibility layer that allows users to treat a files located elsewhere as if it is on the local disk.

Instead of having to use sftp to download a file from a site, or wget to download a file from the webserver or even evolution to download a file from the mail server, you can just use one common interface for all files reguardless of their storage or access method.

This means a tighter and more consistent user experience.

SO there!

useless protocols?

[JBdH]

I don't get why it is useful to be able to type devices:// or whatever. For some of these protocols the ramifications are totally unclear: if i'd type pop3://myserver/mymailbox would that actually download my messages and effectively erase them from the server? The useful protocols are covered in Win(XP) very well, including the most useful (not mentioned in the article) : webdav over https.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Wesley Felter]

Apple is doing this stuff (e.g. you can mount WebDAV servers), but Apple is doing it right by integrating network resources into the real VFS layer so that all applications can access them. KDE's I/O slaves are not real filesystems and are not accessible by all applications.

Re:Marketspeak

[cozziewozzie]

Sure, using all these things from the browser interface is stupid, but you're missing the point. Konqueror is not a browser, it's merely a shell which is very nice for viewing webpages. You are not supposed to browse most of these things (nntp, mail etc.) from Konqueror, but you CAN simply because you can embed just about anything into Konqueror.

The useful thing is for example:

- Writing a webpage in Quanta and uploading it directly to your webserver simply by typing ftp://blahblah in the file save dialog.
- Streaming your movios from an smb share directly to Kaffeine without needing to use smbmount or anything similar. Or stream directly from http or ftp or ssh servers
- Opening an mp3 song from an audio CD. You simply type audiocd:// in the file open dialog and you'll be able to find a virtual mp3 on there. You open it from amaroK and you get an mp3 encoded on the fly. OK, not the most useful usage and not sure if it works, but you get the drift

The point is, if it works from Konqueror, it works from EVERYWHERE in KDE. Automatically.

Re:What a relief.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's great, but please, cite your sources. Googling came up with this site: thebest404pageever

Re:Don't be a hater

[Per Wigren]

The fact of the matter is that on built in network transparency, KDE has no equal.

Yes, the Amiga. Just put the file "ftp.device" in DEVS:, mount FTP: and every single application can now use say ftp://ftp.sunet.se/ as if it was a local disk. ftp.device was written in the early 90s but the backend technology was there in 1986...