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KDE 2.0 Technology Overview
Recently, there was an article about a KDE 2.0 Technology overview here on Slashdot. Unfortunately, the article it linked to was missing some details and didn't give some necessary information, which caused a huge number of complaints and misunderstanding in issues like CORBA, DCOP etc. Now mofset has posted an updated Technology Overview with all the explanations about what's going on with KDE 2.0, CORBA, DCOM, KSycoca and other terms. What do you think?
It all depends on which CORBA implementation you use. I have a simple CORBA demonstration server here, on which 'size' reports 4119 bytes on the server and 3938 bytes on the client.
Ah yes, XML-RPC. It makes sense now.
I can look like a mac, beos, or whatever i want.. even changing icons, title bars, everything really.. under 1.0 it didn't work well, but 1.1 added a great theme manager, and 1.1.1 built apon that even more.
Are they going to do another brilliant move and move the files out of /opt/kde again?
It's the most annoying thing in the world to get redhat rpm's and watch them put it in a f'd up location, true switchdesk is nice and all but leave it where it was intended by the programmers!
I know RedHat likes to make everything customized, but jesus leave it alone. I like RedHat overall and their new installer is damned nice (esp. compared to the old 4.2 which is so archaic it's almost funny), but the damn thing formats / without asking unless you select custom install. Thats crazy, and annoying as hell, done that twice to me, oh well thank god for 4 harddrives.
I whole heartedly agree. In addition to which the corba semantics and definitions have all been defined by committee which means that every one tried to be nice to one another trying to achieve consensus and it shows. Ease of programming definitely seemed to have been at the bottom of their wish list.
so you're basically saying that linux is only for the rich-either large companies like IBM and Oracle or people who have enough time on their hands to give away their work for free. Screw the small developers huh?
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$1000 is not that much, even for the small developer. If you plan to sell a shareware app for 10$ a pop, and expect to sell 1000 copies, then you've just grossed $9000! If you don't plan to sell that many copies, perhaps it's time you rethought your whole vocation.
Head on down to your local Mom-And-Pop store on the corner. It doesn't matter what they're retailing. Now take a look at their fixtures. How much to you think it cost them? Real life example: Mom-And-Pop carpet store down the street: Armstrong Vinyl rack = $1000~; each individual carpet waterfall = $50-75$ and there are 25 of them, and this isn't covering the samples; specialized accounting software = $1500 per cpu; carpet roller in the back = $5000; etc., etc., etc. And these are the small guys!!!
$1000 is peanuts for a quality tool like Qt, and it even comes with support and updates. It's nothing compared to what you'll have to spend on quality marketing.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Damn. Any interest in trying again, this time with a Qt 2.0 or GTK+ 1.2 theme?
Anybody know if Microsoft has an SDK for the Office "Assistants"? Having Tux or Beastie suggest you use StarOffice or KOffice or... instead, or having Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo or Bart Simpson or some other alternative, could be amusing....
Support? Ever call MS? At my old job, we had a problem with this query on sql server 6.5...called tech support, they insisted it was us. Then they tried it...they crashed it too. Called us back a few days later...'don't do that' was their solution. You call that support?
I'm running it now you blithering git. Ever heard of CVS? Did that look like a release announcement to you?
It'd be nice to have 256 different clipboard units, like AmigaOS had in 1986(and microsoft are passing off multiple clipboards as a great new feature in office 2000)
>Bite my ass. That kind of shareware would help bring Linux to the >forefront of the computing world.
Says who? Windows users? Spare us please.....
That doesn't sound like a good idea...
Yes, XML is a language.
XML is a subset of SGML.
XML is a metalanguage.
XML is for doing markup.
XML is not a programming language.
-rozzin.
What's the memory usage of the ORB?
GNOME is using Corba fairly extensively. The activation code uses it, the control-center/panel uses it. Bonobo uses it. Gnumeric uses it (you can manipulate your spreadsheet through CORBA calls), and even the CD player uses it. The file manager uses it to manage the desktop (want to add an icon, just make a CORBA call.) A lot of the simple stuff, though has a GtkObject wrapper or something similar so app developers don't need to know they're using CORBA.
...is for KDE to be able to use GTK+/E themes.
That would be very, very nice. I have precisely no clue as to how hard it would be, though.
On a different note, I'd like to know how much effort is going into the installer for KDE 2.0; the 1.0 one wasn't much to speak of (although it's better than GNOME's - i.e. it does at least exist).
Peter.
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Peter
DDE doesn't do applications embedding. That's OLE. DDE is a horse-dung IPC mechanism that sends messages in the message queue to EVERY RUNNING APPLICATION on a Windows boxen.
The expense of ORB calls can be very similar to the cost of initially calling a shared lib, but from then on shared library calls will tend to be much faster than ORB calls. This difference gets exaggerated when a lot of data is passed in the call and/or in the result, because all of it has to go through the transport representation conversion and data transmission.
Now, while I've done a fair amount of IDL/ORB/IIOP stuff in my time, I haven't looked into the KDE code at all. If they did it right, they should have a lightweight IPC API that can use a variety of transports and that will autmatically use the much faster local *nix capabilities on the local machine, and the moderately slower Xlib capabilties between X-displays, and use CORBA for anything more divergent. Point being the app writer should not have to particularly know or care.
CORBA is VERY time expensive, esp. when you're talking about things that have a dramatic influence on the perception of speed, like redrawing windows.
Often the user's feeling of performance is based more on finding the right place to stick the delay than in having the fastest end-to-end time for a process.
Case in point: I once eliminated hundreds of user's complaints about a slow system by slowing it down about 40%. We had a PowerBuilder (ugh!) front end to a client-server application. One of the forms had a pick list that was HUGE, populated by a stored procedure call. That call would often take 3-4 minutes to complete. Users went bananas because they got the good olde Win 3.1 hourglass while the pick list was populated.
I changed the code to pick up one record at a time from the result set and insert it in the pick list rather than make the single "all at once" call. It actually took 2-3 minutes longer to fully populate the pick list, but the users never got the hourglass and could start working the form right away. Zero complaints.
I guess what I'm saying is, KDE is a UI. As such, it has to focus on user issues, not technological issues. I am 100% a technology guy. I'd rather satisfy myself that things are done right than satisfy users. Even so, the KDE folks want people to use their software. That means they have to address user issues first and put architecture second. It seems to me they are doing a danged fine job of balancing these concerns.
Well there are ways to trim down CORBA alot to bypass network requirements, etc...but yes, even the trimmest CORBA orb will have some additional overhead over straight calls...it just needs to be used when appropriate.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
this shows that moderators are anal, and have no sense of humor
Just checking... BTW: KDE looks more like CDE than anything else.
Can you run the gnome panel and kill the kde panel? Hmmm?
Yep... except that no kpanel stuff will integrate into the gnome panel, and vice versa (yet...)
There's _no problem_ (except waste of space) runing both GNOME and KDE apps on the same desktop. They just don't talk to eachother much (yet) - KDE invented their own Drag and Drop protocol, while GNOME inherited motif's
> I can't find any mention of improved clipboard > services in the KDE 2.0 doc. When I looked at > the KDE 1.1.2 code recently there were only > three types of clipboard data - text, bitmap and > URL's. KDE 2 will have a much better clipboard support - any data can be copied and pasted, it will be recognized by mimetype.
Americans tend are slower to use KDE - the "not invented here" syndrome. Pretty much all europeans use KDE before GNOME (they'll run GNOME apps on their KDE desktop, though). KDE looks better, is more stable, and is more mature. Note: do not judge the stability of KDE by the RedHat 6.0 / 6.1 installation. I have no idea why, but it's really flaky on my system - Mandrake KDE is rock solid...
GNOME is alright so long as you're a C programmer.
Anyway, I'm wondering what GNOME's extensive use of CORBA and KDE's general eschewing of CORBA will mean for full integration of the environments. In particular, I wonder when, if ever, kpanel will communicate with E. I love E, but not being able to use the taskbar in kpanel is too much of a loss to let me switch over (from kwm, natch). For those of you who are wondering about kpanel and E playing together, the launchers and swallowed apps work fine if you invoke kpanel --no-KDE-compliant-window-manager, but the dern taskbar (the only good thing Microsoft ever invented, except maybe Joliet) doesn't work. D'oh!
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Sorry "itp", but nobody uses Bonobo.
Wrong--perhaps the best GNOME app, gnumeric, uses it.
I've tended to shy away from KDE, after KDE 1.x proved very slow on my box. However, I'm definitely going to give this a try, and see how it performs now.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
However, as I understand it, the overhead of a local execution in a good ORB (say ORBit or OmniORB) is equivalent to that of a shared library call. Why not use a good ORB and have the added benefit of network communications?
Can someone who is brighter than I explain this? For the record, I actually use KDE and am not a GNOMEr in any real sense of the word.
-- Slashdot sucks.
Umm CORBA is used in distributed computing, along with Java. In fact today I was just talking to a guy who has been doing just that, at NASA. As far as being open sourced it's not but it is quite a substantial example, that it isn't as useless as you say. I personally haven't worked with it though so I don't know how difficult it is to learn.
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Just your ordinary BOFH
http://killertux.org
Also, what PIM needs a PII/233+ and 64MB of RAM to run ?
Lotus Notes 5 Client
Having recently compiled a snapshot of KDE 2.0, I can say with some conviction that it's a Windows killer. The usability is much better, and the optimised build much smoother. Having had to do some testing of Unix apps running under the Windows Reflections X server, I'm suprised at just how poorly NT performs when more than one application is open. (I mean Windows apps like Outlook and Explorer, not the Unix apps).
The loss of Mico as a dependency for KDE 2.0 is also a good thing. Mico is just too large for it to form the basis of a component model, the only place it really shines is truly network transparent CORBA apps.
Chris Wareham
You morons all missed the point. I often times will write a small app that fills a need for myself. I think 'Gee, maybe a few others could use this..' and put a blurb in it about sending me $10 as a donation of sorts. Not necessarily to make a lot of profit, just hope someone cares and appreciates it enough to send the $10. Now, I owe TrollTech $1000 for Qt. F*ck them. I don't even plan to make money and certainly not $1000 off it, just a couple of 'donations'. I don't plan my life or my career around it. Get the point dickhead?
On a related topic - would it be possible to rework the Lesstif libraries in such a way that they would support a different look and feel? That would make UI integration almost perfect (except for statically linked binaries).
Anyway, just my US$0.02
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
I rather like the idea of two levels of IPC: a basic set and the whole CORBA shebang. Maybe the existence of a simple set of common hooks in this department will encourage more developers to make their programs friendlier to other programs. More modularity is a good thing, to me.
:)
I'm looking forward to the release. Whenever that is.
-W-
Is it all journey, or is there landfall?
--Ellison & van Vogt, 'The Human Operators'
I did some reading on the KDE mailing lists, and from what I gather the problem is not so much the efficiency of the calls, but their limitations.
You can't use pointers across a network. All arguments are passed by value. That those values could be passed as fast as a shared library implementation isn't important. Sometimes you just need pointers.
The straw that broke the camel's back for KDE seems to be the plugins for KImageShop. Those plugins would be processing bitmaps - potentially several megabytes of data. For a shared library you just pass a pointer. For something like CORBA you have to:
a) serialize the bitmap to well defined external representation.
b) transmit that to the plugin
c) unserialize it to a bitmap object again.
d) do the real processing
e) serialize again
d) transmit again
f) unserialize again.
This is silly. Nobody is going to run an image processing plugin over the network.
CORBA has a place. When you do want to work across processors / OSes / toolkits / networks / programming languages you *have* to do these steps some way or another, and having something like CORBA is a huge improvement over the ad hoc solution du jour.
You also have to deal with communications failures, the other end going ga ga, latency problems, bandwith problems, how do I find the other end on this big internet thingy anyway, security etc.
If your application is distributed you inherently have these problems, and it's great to have a mechanism to help you solve them.
If you just want a stinking plugin, it's a pain.
The reason I've noticed is that there are no managers, and no executives, and no stockholders in the OSS movement. The closest we come are people like Linus... think back on how many times you read posts to the kernel mailing list when he rejects patches with comments along the lines of "this patch is crap. try again when you can actually fix the problem." - the man has got FINAL authority and he's not a manager. After spending a full day at work surrounded by fsck'ing idiots in decision making roles it is so refreshing to come home and sink into the OSS world where technical decisions are made for technical reasons, not politics, not money.
I could name quite a few instances where the folks in the trenches knew in their heart and soul that product X, or codebase Y was technically superior to W or Z but were overruled by management because they had been deemed "non-strategic". In OSS this simply wouldn't happen. The highest leaders would probably feel the same way, or if they didn't would open and lead a free (as in speech) technical discourse on the topic untill either a decision was made or the factions clearly stalemated and splintered. While splinters aren't usually good on the grand scheme of things, they're so much more important on the individual scale as they keep the developers interested in their work; rather than becoming bitter about the code they're forced to work on being such putrid slime.
Oh, and to bring it back to the specific ideas... I can think of two corporate projects off the top of my head that were killed becuase they were NOT using CORBA, but in fact had implemented their own distributed object technology that was either incredibly lite weight or far more feature-full. And several more that are being forced to move to CORBA.
p.s. I do have an account, but since many of my co-workers and a couple managers read
This article sounds a little bit like spin to me. Not trying to start a flamewar, but here we see a bit of the architectural advantage the Gnome folks have. Writing a completely new ORB (ORBit) might have been a bit 'o work, but it's paying off for the Gnome project, while KDE still struggles with MICO.
Every application supports a basic set of IPC operations for communicating to other applications, and it is not reasonable to expect *every* application to link to any ORB.
I'm no expert, but I'm not sure I understand this. If you're already going to have the ORB running, and you've got the libraries in memory, how much of a price do you pay having 100 applications using CORBA vs. 1 application using CORBA and 99 using some other mechanism?
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Ian Peters
He also writes the widget/theme code for KDE 2.
The scenario alot of slashdotters believe (which is not addressed in the article) is that KDE is somehow going to become the de facto GUI. Well, due in part to the paranoia that alot of us have as well as the fact that the two groups have seperate goals, that isn't going to happen. One may be more popular than the other (How many people still use fvwm instead of E?), but because of open source (Yes, Richard, I know it's not free software..) it's impossible for either gnome or kde to co-op the other.
Besides, if that happened the paranoia many of us share in this community would quickly fork the tree and continue along a "free" path, essentially killing the old version.
So relax - there is NOTHING to worry about in this area. And while I'm up here on this soapbox - Redhat is OK too - so stop complaining about them becoming the next MS too.
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The fact that this flamebait is moderated up to three proves how anti-KDE some moderators are.
(tears streaming)
(writhing on floor)
(curly shuffle)
Whew.
(quiet moment)
LOL!
Magellan Overview
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
This irresponsibility is proof that immature wannbe's should be allowed to moderation. Welcome to slashdot, folks.
I completely agree! I'm supposed to be getting -1's folks, WTF are you moderators thinking?!?!?!?
Worse than an untouchable, when I reincarnate I'll be lucky to return as bacteria.
This isnt insightful, its only marginally funny. I'm looking forward to when it gets to meta-moderation.
It only takes one or two moderators with nothing better to do to get stuff like this to the top.
I've noticed that once something starts going up it tends to accelerate past 3 and up to five, even if its only mildly worthwhile.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
If little gnomies moderating this up to 5 is any indication, they are right.
Now, make sure you also give strong support to the GNOME project.
Divide and conquer, and all that.
So, where is GNOME's Office suite? Where's the word processor, the spreadsheet, the presenter, the illustrator, the image maker, the database, etc etc, that are all part of one nice suite? Koffice.kde.org. gno-office.gnome.org. "caught up" please.
What are distributed objects that are OS and platform independent good for? Presumably you already know the answer. (Hint: it is NOT "nothing")
No .. not really . here in my office there are 5 developers running linux and one free bsd. Of all linux people only one is running twm and the rest KDE.
And I can assure you our office is most definately located in US ( Chicago).
This is not a problem of having scripting language like VB. There are good scripting tools available for unix. The problem is that Linux is lacking in infrastructure like unified access to databases (ODBC) and things like that. ...
These things make VB so easy to use
XSL is an application of XML, not XML itself. You don't use the existence of C as proof that ASCII is a programming language.
Yes, and you don't markup text in XML either, but with an application of it.
/mill
The original claim was "It is an important step to a completely component based architecture programmable via languages such as XML in as powerful a manner as the native API." but of course they mean an application of XML. Just like Glade doesn't save an representation of a Gtk GUI in XML.
When people say "XML" they mostly mean "an application of XML" and in that context XML is an programming language - if one wants to.
How the heck KDE is going to affect load on X caused be other apps ?
Other KDE apps you twit.
And as someone who has been programming X applications since the bad old days of OpenLook and then Motif, I have a feeling I know what I'm talking about.
Chris Wareham
E is KDE compliant as Of 0.16 - so it'll work with the taskbar.
George Russell
as someone with a wife suffering from MS I find this completely tasteless
There are seriously some people who think if it's not Xlib it's evil. Funny.
A screenshot of a well-known applet in kicker (formerly known as kpanel) can be found here.
The new hicolor-icons are not in CVS-HEAD yet though. So if you don't like the icon above, be aware of the fact that it is still one of the old locolor-icon for people with 8-bit-graphics-adapters.
If you haven't seen the new icons yet, have a look here (PNG) or here (JPG)!
Have a nice day,
ac
Even http://www.kdeforum.org/ is asking for a username/password.
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Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
Man, the author writes up front that it's a (Score:-1, Troll). He obviously intended it to be slightly offensive because that's the point of HUMOR.
You folks are WAY OVER-REACTING!
KDE is fine. Gnome is fine. Go on and continue your boring and bland lives where everything is politically correct.
ac
Who wants your friggin blurb begging for money? Crap like that has no place on the street, much less Linux. That's called "pandering" or "panhandling" when done elsewhere.
>so you're basically saying that linux is only for the rich-either >large companies like IBM and Oracle or people who have enough time on >their hands to give away their work for free. Screw the small >developers huh?
Damn right. They've been screwing us for years. It's exactly the 10 dollar crap app that's turned a hell of a lot of people off on shareware. A lot of that crap is buggy as hell and the people who release it know it. They figure they can con people into "upgrading" to the "professional" versions of the software. In other words shareware has become pretty much a "bait and switch" operation and it's something most of the people using Linux/BSD want no part of anymore.
And my castle has a garden.
Also, if you sell your something for Gnome for $10, that not free. That is wrong. The only GNOME library not under LGPL is the libgtop library, which I doubt you'd need anyway.
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
In the past this thread would have been nothing but unintelligent flames from both camps. Either the general maturity of KDE/Gnome advocates has increased or Slashdot moderation is really working. Either way, I'm impressed!
Wouldn't it have been easier to implement an ORB that didn't suck (ye ghods, what were you using, anyway?) than throw away all your work?
Thats fine, I personnally think it should be at about 2, funny. It was at 5, interesting when I posted. This post doesnt merit that ;)
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Take a look at winfiles.com and see all of the shareware available for windows. That is because, unlike TrollTech, even M$ doesn't charge a developer fee. I will not pay $1000 to TrollTech so I can develop a small app and sell it for $10. Not a chance in hell. I will do it for Gnome for free. KDE needs to REPLACE that crap from TrollTech or it will not succeed like windows has. My 2
Language, yes. Programming language, no.
XML = eXtensible Modeling Language.
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Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
****Gfx Scrollbar Special case hit!!*****
A screenshot of a well-known applet in kicker (formerly known as kpanel) can be found here.
The new hicolor-icons are not in CVS-HEAD yet though. So if you don't like the icon above, be aware of the fact that it is still one of the old locolor-icon for people with 8-bit-graphics-adapters.
If you haven't seen the new icons yet, have a look here (PNG) or here (JPG)!
(This one is a screenshot of KDE 1.1.2)
Have a nice day,
ac
free?
Take a look at winfiles.com and see all of the shareware available for windows. That is because, unlike TrollTech, even M$ doesn't charge a developer fee. I will not pay $1000 to TrollTech so I can develop a small app and sell it for $10. Not a chance in he||. I will do it for Gnome for free.
KDE needs to REPLACE that cr@p from TrollTech or it will not be as successful as windows has.
My 2
I applaud KDE for this decision.
:-) ), take up at least 32MB of RAM, and a large percentage of CPU cycles. Neither of these are acceptable for the purpose this software was designed for - systems management. The system is consequentially unusable in the environment I have been tasked to install it in.
If you want to really see bloat with Corba, look at the agent processes supplied as part of CA Unicenter.
It varies from OS to OS, but on most systems the agents, which do no more than monitor a few OS stats and parameters (and badly chosen ones too
It is often the case that software developers adopt a new technology without realising the full consequences, and when they do, it is too late to go back. I have seen a major application become unusable due to the developers wanting to recode the next version in C++, as opposed to ironing out the bugs in the C port. This application consumed four times as much memory, was noticably slower, and was incompatable with the majority of existing installations. CORBA appears to be the new fad.
I may even get round to trying a development release KDE 2.0. I have not been able to install KDE 1.1.2, as I can't get Qt to compile with gcc-2.95.1. Maybe 2.95.2, just released will fix this.
If you want to write shareware crap like on winfiles.com you better stick to windows, your not wanted here.
If adopting ORBit fixed things, KDE can adopt ORBit, just like GNOME adopted KDE's HTML widget.
If adopting ORBit fixed things, KDE can adopt ORBit, just like GNOME adopted KDE's HTML library.
It's very lame that the Windows version isn't free for non-commericial use. I wanted to compile Qt Slash'em (nethack variant) on NT and those freaks charge for Windows Qt. Screw that - no open source group should be using Qt unless it's free for non-commercial use on all the platforms for which the product is available. I know - who cares about NT. Well - some of use it because we need it. Hell, some of us even prefer it to Unix and aren't the least bit ashamed to admit it.
Yep. Gnome is the future. All these 12 people who are using it can certainly confirm that.
Really, KDE has a chance to develop something truly usable and something that will last. They actually do care about the user which can hardly be said about most GPL software. ...
Way to go , guys
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
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this sounds like a way to put a nice face on some technical issues they were unable to resolve.
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This IS the solution to the technical issues, thus
they were not unable to resolve them.
Facades As Distributed Components
Distributed Facade
My heuristic is that one should design CORBA interfaces thinking of them as network protocols, not as collections of objects in a program.
You don't appear to be someone unfamiliar with programming, so I'd love to see some of your code, and hear what languages you've written in.
-rozzin.
You don't have to pay a dime. If you want to use it for commercial development you have to pay for it, just like the GPL can require you to do. If you are not contributing free software back to the community you have no right to take advantage of it for your commercial applications. That is very much in line with RMS, who dislikes the LesserGPL. As far as shareware is concerned, let that stay with Windows.
This is Linux, shareware isn't acceptable. *Real* commercial developers have no problem with the TT and free software developers get to use a free library.
Why you people spread FUD is beyond me. KDE's the best desktop for Linux available.
Idiots.
..And see all the FREE software for Linux and
KDE. Shareware and Linux rarely goes together,
because most GPL-software is far better than
shareware anyway.
Big commercial-applications may be better,
but the companies behind those have no problem
with the license-fee.
umm. MS = Microsoft. not playing on the condition MS.
So says RMS. KDE 2.0 will use Qt 2.0 which is not only "open source", but better yet it is "free". Being a sysadmin at a shop that is migrating from Windows to Linux/Solaris/NetBSD I am really psyched about this great desktop environment that will make the migration much much easier.
> > ...it's a Windows killer. The usability is much better, and the optimised build much smoother. > Um, exactly how often to you tend to (re)build Windows, then? Perhaps you meant "... smoother than on previous versions" on that last part, and I'm just being picky? ;^) I meant that KDE 2.0 built with optimisation is much smoother than Windows - no annoying lock ups while apps load or do something mildly heavyweight.
Chris Wareham
All that fancy stuff that kde did via its fancy mechanisms is easily and best done by X. They now see that X itself has the power required to implement 95% of their management...it was there all along. Congrads KDE team for waking up.
"XML is not a programming language"
No, you are right but you could use it to model a program just like you would model other datastructure. I have often wondered why we still have to store our precious source code in flat file databases (ascii files). I don't see any apparent reason except that many people like to use text editors to work on their source code. Because of this much syntactic sugar is put into the languages at the cost of structure and readability.
Treating a program as a DOM instead of a large set of ascii files scattered in multiple directories would allow for really cool tools. I'm thinking of code transformations, changing an identifier name and have the effect of the change spread through the whole program (no references to non existent stuff), no more syntax errors (the DTD prevents illegal edits), and a whole lot more.
Jilles
That has to be my single-least-favorite part of KDE. No dock apps.
Of course, I just have a bunch of Wmaker dock apps on the side
of my screen and I tell the advanced window settings to make them
start stikcy and never get focus. Works pretty well.
I definately think that the panel is the weakest portion of kde (1.x) at least.
Can you run the gnome panel and kill the kde panel? Hmmm?
/* CDM */
well that was what I ment ..... she's forced to use MS :-) .... it's a dread disease .... she'd rather use KDE like me
Component architecture has been touted and worked toward for many years by many of us. If KDE folk are proposing a new component architecture (which it is not totally clear they are) then that architecture needs to be published and subject to serious peer review. The new component architecture needs a way to bridge to the larger non-KDE component space. And no, just being told to go look at the CVS is not adequate at all. Does anyone know of a good detailed published description of this stuff?
I do indeed wish that Qt were free on the windows side as well. I wasn't arguing against it. I'm very sure that once Troll Tech can figure out the appropriate funding mechanism, they will. After all, their clientele aren't exactly the type that would use and pay for a support-based funding model.
What I was arguing against was the myth that the QPL'd Qt is only free for freeware and that once you charge for your application you must use the professional version.
If you look at it a certain way, Qt is free for NT for you to compile QTSlash'em, you just have to run it under X under NT.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I'm not an expert in either field but from what I can tell all Gnome is really using Corba for is applets and it's office suite, not nowhere as much as KDE wants to use it for. The stuff KDE wants to use all over the place (the equivalent of Bonobo I guess), isn't used at all in the core AFAIK.
It is an important step to a completely component based architecture programmable via languages such as XML in as powerful a manner as the native API.
XML a language? Surely not, or has it become more ambitious since I last checked up on it...
Nitpicking apart, this strikes me as a very sensible approach. CORBA is a bloated enough standard as it stands without being made to do things it wasn't designed for. Has anyone ever heard of DCOM before? Where else is it used?
I just can't live without swallowed apps in my Gnome and Window Maker docks. Will KDE ever get these?
I boot up with the penguin,
/bin/sh and rc galore,
My system ain't no lie,
I don't run that fascist MS crap,
I got the birdy suit and tie!
Boot up the lilo and watch dmesg roar,
see init launch
It's OK to startx,
fvwm's my friend,
but touch that KDE crap
and stain your self with
Chorus
MMMMMSSSS MMMMMSSSS
stain yourself with
MMMMMSSSS MMMMMSSSS
unchorus
KDE's like Windows,
It's DCOM by 'nother name,
you want the real baby,
you'd write it in pure Xlib!
So next you boot the penguin,
give yourself a pause,
should you consider KDE,
know it breaks the UNIX laws!
Chorus
MMMMMSSSS MMMMMSSSS
stain yourself with
MMMMMSSSS MMMMMSSSS
unchorus
Worse than an untouchable, when I reincarnate I'll be lucky to return as bacteria.
Not even GPL'd is truly free. Only public domain is truly free.
Enough said.
Get a clue dude! Qt is 100% open source and RMS certified Free. Go to Troll Tech and download it! No questions asked. No need to enter in a credit card number.
Yes, the ***Windows*** version is proprietary, but the X11 versions free. And there's nothing preventing you from porting one to the other. You can even use Free Qt to create proprietary X11 apps!
You said: "even M$ doesn't charge a developer fee." I say bullshit. Go price out the full version of VC++. But then you may be comparing the much cheaper (but still charged for) VB to Qt, and if you are, you really need a clue if you think they're equivalent in any way.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
True.
Umm, and what do you call XSL?
/mill
I had a major breakdown (someone fiddled around with the server, filling the disk), but it's up again (damn, why does it break just today :}). ;)
Unfortunately some newer comments were lost. I hope I can get them back, and then I'll move to Zope 2
The login prompt was due to wrong TinyTable permissions after the backup.
Linux/xBSD users (and people of the open source inclination) don't tend to pay for their software. You need only look at some of the threads about Opera vs. Mozilla to know their heated opinions on the matter. Linux shareware might just be a doomed failure. Anyway, if someone really wants to develop shareware for Linux, there are certainly more toolkits than just Qt. Not KDE compatible toolkits, but good ones nonetheless.
Moreover, I don't think that the KDE people should necessarily have to change their toolkit just to suit the needs of other people. They've got a wonderful product and it's built upon Qt. They don't care about the license, because they develop it for free anyway. I personally agree with them but, of course, you may beg to differ.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
That's an oxymoron if I ever heard one...let's see a Sun E10k, that's big iron, but as a desktop?, for one thing it's too high and too hot, not to mention expensive.
As for you main point, yes bloated office apps can make any computer slow, regardless of the OS.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
I agree with your assessment completely. We had to abandon a ten programmer 18 month CORBA development because the size and complexity of CORBA was getting out of hand. We replaced it with an asynchronous messaging solution (non-CORBA) in a quarter of the time and the system shrank from 100 Megs of binaries to 12 Megs. Our application runs much faster as result. If CORBA is the answer - what's the question? I welcome any solution such as DCOP that actually saves time - and money - not a solution that creates work and headaches.
And kicker (the new panel for 2.0) supports applets with libICE DCOP communication and stuff like adding and removing kicker menu items dynamically. Someone already wrote a wrapper for WindowMaker applets (mosfet@kde.org)
However, I wish there was some effort being done in making the various desktop environments intercompatible... I'd love to see development aimed at making it easier to code stuff that will run as smoothly on Gnome and KDE.
Linux definitely needs that sort of interportability, but unfortunately it seems that development of applications for Linux is mostly modular, which leads to various branching left and right. It's a good thing Gnome and KDE aren't branching.
Hackers of the world, unite?
"Knowledge = Power = Energy = Mass"
I check the CVS from time to time and there is no requirement to use an ORB at all in any of the core stuff anymore. Some applications need it, but they are optional.
since that's mentioned elsewhere.
> > It is an important step to a completely
> > component based architecture programmable via
> > languages such as XML in as powerful a manner as
> > the native API.
>
> XML a language? Surely not, or has it become more ambitious since I last checked up on it...
FYI, XML is now starting to be used as the representation layer for RPC/RMI in XML-RPC and SOAP. AFAIK these are both Microsoft initiatives, but given that they are based on standards and replace Microsoft's proprietary DCOM, I wouldn't write them off just because of that.
There's also libglade which allows a GTK UI to be configured at run-time via XML (not sure if there's anything equivalent in the Qt world yet).
XML seems to be becoming pretty pervasive as a method of data representation...
I know CORBA is good for consultants to fill their wallets - I do it myself - but seriously - what IS CORBA good for? You've got to read a 1000 page book to even understand the damn thing and when you're done you've got a bloated and slow system. Anyone ever deliver a large scale open source system that actually uses CORBA? (actual ORB implementations don't count)
There are only 12 of us? But the lab I am working in seems really crowded, I don't understand...
No KDE users, 15 WinNT users, 10 FVWM users, 8 GNOME users, a couple of SGIs and a guy running TWM
Why no KDE users? Because it isn't getting any better. GNOME caught up, and all KDE have is promises for the future.
Also because those damn WinNT users have Office, and Gnumeric + Abiword load MS Office documents, something KOffice won't deliver any time soon.
I don't think the free-ness (or lack of it) in KDE 1.x even came into the decision...
I would love to see a development system like Visual Basic. Yeah I know, I can hear the flames already, but VB allows you to knock up some nice database apps in a snap. It's just a shame they only work under Windows.
May not be appealing to serious developers, but VB has a lot of followers, and some of us (including me) make a nice living cooking up these bespoke apps for our customers. If I had something like VB, I could easily convert some of my customer over to Linux.
Last time this subject came up, a number of people lamented the idea that KDE would abandon the "open standard" of CORBA for a new approach. I'm glad Mosfet has cleared things up a bit by explaining that libICE is equally a standard which, in fact, is a lot more common in the Unix/Linux world than CORBA.
What I find really strange is the argument that GNOME's use of CORBA makes it more standards compliant than KDE. Don't get me wrong, if ORBit works well for this application, that's fantastic, keep using it. But ORBit actually implements only a very small fraction of a modern CORBA standard (MICO is fully 2.2 compliant with all the bells and whistles, so it is a slug in terms of performance), and does not yet provide C++ or Java bindings. Essentially, it's a handy, GNOME-only solution, like KParts is a handy, KDE-only solution.
--JRZ
OK. Lots have people have posted messages to the effect of "In a good ORB, the overhead of a method call to an interface is almost the same as the library." First of, there _is_ an overhead, but we can ignore that.
The big problem with CORBA is _bloat_. If you implement all your internal embedded interfaces with CORBA, it leads to really unweildy sizes.
The server for a simple CORBA demonstration (one structure and 1 interface defining 1 method), compiles to ~70K.
The same functionality, if implemented with sockets or shared libraries, will probably take up less than 10K compiled.
This is the kind of overhead you see with CORBA. Putting CORBA into every nook and cranny of your GUI implementation does not make it 3r33t.
There is a time and place for CORBA. It's not for IPC, and it's not for embedded controls. It's best suited for large distributed applications.
The K people have made a very practical decision by choosing shared libraries.
-Laxative
And as such, varies from ORB to ORB. In the case of our application that I'm working on for work, the ORB, TAO, is fast (In fact, it's one of the fastest ORBs around and is one of the only real-time, embeddable ones...). The only complaint is that it eats something like 2Mb in the system while operating- but once fielded, it's just there, each app gains from it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas