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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.'"
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:/
Good thing the Christmas Island people have made it safe for the goatse:/ handler.
Trolling is a art,
I'm sorry, but to me that bit just reduced a potentially informative article to yet another trivial Slashvertisement.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
My favorite one of course is pr0n:/. But for some reason I get buffer a overflow error - anyone know why? Anyone get pr0n2:/ working yet?
Not to be a nervous-nellie, but isn't adding more networking/protocols to the desktop just asking for more hacking problems?
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
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.'
And the entire Windows OS is decked out with enough user friendliness for most people to use, and, as I put it, 'KDE has a long way to go to catchup with the userfriendliness of Mac OSX and Windows.
Windows, as much as everyone hates it, is still more user friendly than KDE. If they'd spend more time on user friendliness and less on robust (aka confusing, complex) features, they'd find more people willing to try it out.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
This is one of the things that has impressed me most about KDE. The protocol handlers can make working with some of these protocols a piece of cake.
Also worth noting however, is the DCOP system integrated into KDE. The protocol handlers and DCOP can and do make a powerful combination.
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
That didn't take long. I was thinking that I would have to scroll down more then one page to see that garbage.
KDE is pretty damned easy to use and consistent too, it's just that not all applications are written in QT, just as not all Gnome apps are written in GTK. So, you get some apps that don't fall in line with the look and feel of the rest of the OS.
So is the way of the Linux desktop right now, and you can't single out KDE for that.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I'm a regular MacOS X user. And I love MacOS X, but there are some things that I miss about KDE. I try to follow KDE's progress even though it is not my desktop of choice these days.
The network transparency of KDE is brilliant. I'm not sure where the holdup for OSX is, but I would kill to be able to open a location with cmd-k, fish://user@myhost
I suspect that for Apple to add these bits would require some OS level work as well as some finder work. I hope they'd take that opportunity to update the finder to be a cocoa application. (As a side note, the Finder continues to bother me. My Mac savvy friends and I joke that the Finder, Mail.app, and Quicktime teams are Microsoft moles trying to take Apple down from the inside).
Anyone have any speculation as to why Apple hasn't already done some of the truly nifty network protocols? They've already got a finder view for FTP (which, unfortunately is dog-slow). Still, Apple has proven itself as a very agile software company. They've got a track record for adding features correctly and quickly, but the lack of an SSH handler is baffling to me.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
I thought this was pretty boring until I read this part:
Being able to do all of these things from a web browser is definitely a nice parlor trick, but in reality it's not a very easy way to use a computer. The real power of these protocol handlers is unleashed when they're used within various KDE applications. Any of these protocols can be used from the KDE file dialog, allowing files to be opened from or saved to any protocol!
I must say, as much as I don't really like KDE, that's really slick, and potentially very useful. Nice job guys.
(I'll even withold bashing and pro-gnome comments for the sake of sanity)
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!
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.
This is vaguely reminiscient of the old Unix maxim, "Everything is either a file or a process," except that now KDE calls everything an URL.
/dev/extensions/audiocd/track1, /dev/extensions/sftp/, /dev/extensions/webdav, and so on? This type of a trick would have allowed these extensions to be used in any app that recognizes the file system, not only KDE type apps.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the old way of doing this be something like
What was the reason for not implementing these as devices?
...yet.
Microsoft won't see any need to add new features as long as it's users don't find out, and it's market share remains 90%-ish.
Once it DOES feel threatened though, it'll pour resources and add all the features to it's OS that it thinks will maintain it's dominance. (think Mac/Windows, Netscape/IE, Java/C#).
But it'll probably ultimately fail this time. I'm a Windows fan, but I'm realistic: Linux will win in the long run.
can one "cat perldoc://someuri/perldoc1" ?
if not then it is at the wrong layer to be "transparent"
plan's approach of a unified file system approach is far more transparent
a daemon runs and serves the appropriate files in the namespace as regular filenames
cat
grep bunny
etc.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Is the age-old question of 'does it belong in the kernel'. OSX's webdav and FTP client support accessable from the finder, the analogues to KDE's FTP and webdav protocol plugins, are in reality implemented in the kernel as a filesystem implementation, making them useable from *every*single* application running on the box, not just the ones linked into a particular application framework (KDE). The OSX implementations are truly remote filesystems, upon which I can 'cd', and 'vi' myself into oblivion.
But the downside is that these 'fancy' network filesystems are comparatively sparse relative to KDEs. And we're still waiting for, oh, say, webdav over SSL support (making it actually worthwhile for an intranet filesystem solution).
IF OSX could have retainted the 'filesystem drivers as userspace processes' mantra of the microkernel design philosophy, then we could have the best of both worlds. Especially if we could retain, say, HPFS, FFS, etc. as kernel resident drivers for efficency .
Geez... thirteen comments in and nothing positive to say about what the guy had to say. The fact of the matter is that on built in network transparency, KDE has no equal.
You don't really appreciate it until you use it and then forced to work without it. I present a real world example: a colleague wants some help with the IE CSS scrollbar colors. I open up KWrite, the "simple" text editor, select "Open" from the "File" and plug in the FTP url, with embedded password and all, into the open file dialog. A half a second later I was browsing their directory structure point-and-click in the open file dialog. I find the ".css" file and open it in the editor. I then make my simple changes and hit CTRL-S. The file was saved and uploaded back onto the web server in one simple keystroke combo. And that was it. Mind you all of this was done in KDE's most trivial of text editors and this feature is part of the desktop architecture meaning all KDE apps can employ this feature.
Try doing something like that with the default install of Windows/MacOSX/Be/whathaveyou. And that was the simplest of examples of the network transparency within KDE.
And that's just the network transparency aspect of it. The KIO architecture allows for some really amazing features on the local side as well. If you don't already know about the audiocd:/ slave then look it up or even use it. It will blow your mind.
Don't just take my word for it. Try it before you bash it. Please.
Some people would call such functionality within the desktop 'bloat'. I think before anybody says that, they first need to get themselves into the modern age. As the article mentioned, I find the fish:// handler to be one of the most oft-used handlers. Sure, I could scp remote files to the local machine, but it saves a lot of time to simply use fish:// in the file dialogs and such.
And it works *great* in Amarok, my audio player of choice. I no longer have to keep porting around my mp3 collection: I simply fish to my server and play them from there -- from anywhere. The only downfall, is that I need to force it to go to the next track after it gets to the end of a track, instead of automatically doing so, but it's a minor compared to the above ease-of-use.
No, but being about to type sftp:// into a browser does make KDE more network-transparent than OS X, which was the point of the article! God, I like OS X myself (like Classic even more), but the special moron task force of the Mac user community is really out in force today!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Why does Microsoft need to catch up? Anyone can write an Asynchronous Pluggable Protocol (the handlers for different url monikers). I've written two of them for different applications I've written. It's a great way to tie browsers to HTML not stored on a web server.
mk-its: is used in the HTML help system, and ms-help: is used with the MSDN, and there are probably a few others that most people have never heard of.
But like I said, why is it up to MS? Anyone in the open source community could write APPs for Windows to add this kind of functionality if there were a demand for it, so I suspect there's little or no demand for it.
SSH+SCP would be really nice. fish:// on the other hand, is shear brilliance. It uses Perl on the server side to do some things that are not possible with just SSH+SCP. Those are great fallbacks, but fish:// is innovative. But, I'd be happy with just SSH+SCP. As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist in OSX.
This brings me to another annoyance with OSX: It doesn't tell you when it doesn't know about a protocol. I can tell my OS X 10.3 machine to connect to a server. For a URL I type in "bogusprotocol://foo@foo.foo". The Finder tells me, "Connection Failed. No response from the server. Please try again."
WTF? I'd prefer something like, "You moron, you've just typed in a protocol name that doesn't exist." Please don't say, "Sorry, but we couldn't connect to this perfectly valid URL because the host wasn't available."
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
"For every one geeky thing that OS X can learn from KDE, there are fifty things that KDE can learn about design, usability, polish, and consistency from OS X."
Don't start going about MacOS-X usability until you really look into it a lot deeper. They went all out for high 'walk-up-and-use' value, but not so much for actual usability. Many of the OS-X choices detracted significantly from usability that was present in earlier versions, giving apparent usability rather than actual usability.
This isn't to say their choice was wrong, but they were targetting new users and home users, not pro users. In very many ways, KDE is far more usable than OS-X, it mostly just depends on how talented the user is and what they are trying to do.
...and ctrl-x probably works in a lot of them as well.
And, given that Qt switched in Qt 3 to the closest thing to a standard way of handling the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD selections in X, and that a number of other toolkits, including GTK+, have always done that, it would probably work even between applications using different toolkits in most if not all cases.
I.e., bitching about copy-and-paste in X11 is getting a bit old, at least for complaints about it not working at all, even for text. Perhaps for non-text formats there needs to be a bit more work in the toolkits and applications, but, as I remember, the selections mechanism in the ICCCM does have a mechanism to register data types and to have a recipient of data find out the types in which data in a selection is available, so they can choose the "best" type (e.g., it might be available as rich text or plain text, so that a word processor would fetch the rich-text version but a terminal window would fetch the plain-text version).
Apple has the privilege of only having one VFS layer. There is no such single layer that KDE could rely upon, since it runs on quite a few distinct operating systems.
In my mind there are two ways to look at it. You've presented one way: KDE must have this feature, and if the OSes won't provide it, then KDE must provide it in some suboptimal way.
The alternate approach is to say that mounting a fish or whatever is a feature that belongs in the OS, and if a particular OS supports it, then KDE will get that for free. If an OS doesn't support it, then KDE won't have that feature when running on that OS.