KDE & GNOME Cooperate

||Plazm|| writes " Here's an interesting article on what's in the future for these two dev platforms. Maybe they can play nice after all... 'This past week, there has been an impressive show of cooperation between the KDE and GNOME projects involving prominent hackers from both camps. The initial subject of discussion was concerning a common network-connection manager that would enable applications to detect whether an internet connection was currently available or not; both projects had already been working on the issue including two independent efforts from KDE developers Bjoern Kahl and Matt Koss. The discussion diverged to the larger issue of making GNOME and KDE play nice together including related CORBA matters.' "

Comments

Signal Systems

[Kenelson]

Asside from this development, there has also been some talk on irc between members of the KDE crew and myself on sharing the signal/slot implementation between Gtk-- and Qt. Although the meeting was slightly dampened by my over competive nature, it generally ended with a positive step towards working together. This would further interopablity between KDE and GNOME by allowing the KDE C++ code and C++ GNOME code to share library elements that do not depend on the widget sets.

Sharing of signal/slot implementations would benifit KDE by removing the MOC preprocessor and improve the flexiblity of their signal/slots. GNOME will get the benifit that KDE libraries and applications will be less tied to Qt and thus more easily reused. Since libsigc++, the Gtk-- signal system, is a close translation of the capablities of gtk+ signal system, this should also reduce the burden of programmers trying to understand the two kits. For projects with multiple frontends, this would be a great help.

Unfortunately, this development is not set to be planned until after the summer when the KDE people start a developers cut of Qt. Assuming that people are interested I can give some directions as to how the translation can be made, but I don't have time to work on it heavily myself. (Preliminary specifications have already been sent to Mosfet.) I can mail more info to other interested programmers.

--Karl