Re: Embedding external parts into KDE

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Re: Embedding external parts into KDE
by Matthias Ettrich on Friday 22/Dec/2000, @01:16

KMozilla does not require Qt's ability to utilize GTK widgets. Instead, it reparents an X-Window with XEMBED. This works on a wide range of toolkits.

But your are right. There's indeed nothing revolutionary with the approach, and I don't believe the web page or the whitepaper claim this. It is basically a demonstration on what we TOLD people for a long time now: KParts is not a dead end. It's powerful enough to support other component models. The fact that we use fast inprocess components with a KDE API doesn't mean, we cannot utilize other models. The fact that we dropped CORBA doesn't mean users suffer from less interoperability.

But not everybody is a developer and not everybody understands the technical issues involved. So people simply didn't believe us. "KDE does no longer use CORBA" was percieved as "GNOME components will never be usable in KDE". The only "revolutionary" thing is, that we demonstrated what technical people knew for a long time.

Now, KMozilla is special, because it (or rather GtkMozEmbed) isn's a GNOME or Bonobo component. But the approach we've chosen is indepentent from that. We are confident that we will be able to provide a generic BonoboXPartHost that is able to serve arbitrary Bonobo components as KParts. This is just a bride, it doesn't require changing either Bonobo or KParts.

A similar thing was done with Java and Konqueror previously, or the Netscape Plugin support.

Related Links

·   Articles on Desktop Environment
·   Also by Matthias Ettrich
·   Contact author

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Re: Embedding external parts into KDE
by Jebediah Smith on Friday 22/Dec/2000, @11:34

I didn't mean to suggest that the webpage and/or whitepaper suggested that it was revolutionary. I was trying to set some of the posters here - and on slashdot - straight.

If this same technology could be extended to use Bonobo, I have either read the whitepaper wrong, or you are much smarter than I:)

Probably the latter.

While this certainly shows off KParts' well-designed architecture, I'm unsure if this would be practical.

When loading a Bonobo component, you would have all the overhead of Bonobo (oafd, ORBit, etc) along with KParts' overhead. How would this effect performance?

A better idea, IMNSHO, would be a concerted effort to bring a standard COM to *N*x/BSD.

Please, don't anyone reply with "We have a standard COM....CORBA."

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Re: Embedding external parts into KDE
by Karl-Heinz Zimmer on Saturday 23/Dec/2000, @11:17

On Friday December 22, 2000, Jebediah Smith wrote:

> While this certainly shows off KParts' well-designed architecture,
> I'm unsure if this would be practical.

> When loading a Bonobo component, you would have all the
> overhead of Bonobo (oafd, ORBit, etc) along with KParts' overhead.
> How would this effect performance?

Jebediah, please don't get me wrong, but this does not sound very dramatically to me.
The KParts component model was designed to be effective and easy to implement while at the same time working really FAST.

There is not very much in looking for 'overhead of KParts' - trust me: the time consumed by KParts can be ignored when you have to deal with something that time-consuming as CORBA.

I do *not* intend to start a flame-war against CORBA but I thought it might be good to mention that this possibility of embedding external parts into KDE is a great thing: Just be happy and forget about the *tiny* amount of overhead that might be caused by using the KParts model.

Karl-Heinz

http://home.snafu.de/khz/

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Re: Embedding external parts into KDE
by Jebediah Smith on Saturday 23/Dec/2000, @13:09

You're certainly right. The point of the post was that embedding Bonobo comonents as a KPart would require that oafd, ORBit, et al., be loaded. The added overhead isn't coming from KParts - It's coming from Bonobo.

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