KDE 4 to Support Apple Dashboard Widgets

Ryan writes to tell us Applexnet is reporting that Zack Rusin, a lead developer of KDE, has confirmed that KDE 4 will be able to run and display Dashboard widgets similar to Mac OS X 10.4. From the article: "Basically, this means that a layer (similar in some ways to layers in Adobe Photoshop) in the KDE desktop could function the same way that Dashboard does in Mac OS X. Widgets themselves are not inherently difficult to write nor properly interpret, since they are usually just HTML and Javascript (although Cocoa code can be included, the developer's skills permitting). Furthermore, since Konqueror and Safari share very nearly the same rendering engine, KHTML and WebKit, this too will simplify the process."

Comments

Really?

[Greyfox]

In my experience with Java, you're lucky to get a "Hello world" command line app to run the same from system to system, much less anything more complicated than that. Oh, the language does well enough despite the multitude of JVMs and display options available, but each platform has irritating little quirks that must be accounted for in order for your program to run correctly. It really IS "Write once, test everywhere."

I also seem to recall having about 5 different versions of the Java VM installed on my laptop at one point, one for each app the company was developing at the time. Admittedly that's just because the in-house programmers were lazy, but it all adds up to a not-very pleasant experience with Java.

On the other hand, my favorite online poker site uses java for their application and it works great with just my web browser. Apart from the fact that the browser and java VM crash after about 5 hours of online play, easily avoided by restarting every other break or so.