KDE Development News: October [2/2] Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999
06:02:50 -0500 From: Navindra Umanee To: editors@linuxtoday.com

KDE development tools. KDevelop and KDE hacker
Bernd Gehrmann wrote
in with this update:

With the 1.0
Beta 4.1 release, KDevelop has gone into the next round. Many
important bugs have been fixed, and we are not aware of any
situations in which KDevelop still crashes. If you still have
problems, please read
this note and give helpful information on bugs.

While the last bugs in the 1.0 branch are being ironed out,
some exciting new features are already in the queue for 1.1: John
Birch has written a powerful integrated debugger. The
possibility to set breakpoints directly in KDevelop’s editor
windows promises fast turnaround cycles. Richard Dale has added

support for Objective-C in kwrite, the class parser and some
dialogs. A
patch for kdoc is also available. So in the future, development
for GNUStep could look like this.

Meanwhile, we are already working on KDevelop 2.0, which
will be based on KDE 2. The compiler frontend (now colored) has
been rewritten to support asynchronous message parsing. Further
features include MDI support, a new grep frontend, DocBook support
and the beginnings of a plugin interface.

Recently, Darius Stachow has made available a first
development snapshot of KUML, a graphical
editor for UML diagrams. The drawing engine is already very nice,
but developers for other further diagram types are certainly
welcome. An integration into KDevelop is planned, but of course
KUML will also run standalone and support multiple
languages.

Johannes Sixt has now released the stable 1.0.0 version of
his debugger frontend kdbg. This is
supposed to work both with KDE 1 and KDE 2.

Judin Max also gave us an update on KDE Studio (mirror).
New features include a visual form builder (check out that screenshot),
and a new plugin system with the “Bookmark” and “GlobalBookmark”
plugins implemented. There’s very little documentation available
but if you have questions or want to help, contact Judin.

KDE2: Relentless progress. Daniel M. Duley has
some great updates for us up on his site. Amongst other exciting
news, he
has redesigned both kghostview and kdvi so that they can now act as
Konqueror
browser views, rewritten the KStep widget
style, and ported a whole slew of features to kicker including
QuickBrowser, DND features, client-based dynamic menus and recent
document menus. Also noteworthy: he is working on KDE tutorials
written in the style of the Qt
ones. Rock on.

Waldo Bastien posted his thoughts on a design for
KThread, an attempt to make threading for KDE easy and
portable. It turns out the need for threads had already
been felt and a couple of independent KDE thread implementations
from the likes of
Bavo De Ridder and
Lubos Lunak and
Mirko Sucker already exist.

Roberto Alsina
announced his effort to implement GraphApp/KDE with the
aim of providing a simple C API for KDE. He is
also considering implementing a CORBA interface for this GUI.
Rumour further has it that Roberto is working on a BSD-free library
that will provide some core KDE functionality potentially allowing
commercial companies like RealNetworks and Star Division to more
easily integrate their product with KDE. Roberto also informed
us of the Lazarus
Project, an effort that appears to have produced Pascal
bindings for Qt.

Preston Brown
announced kcmemail, a Control Center module that will
potentially centralize basic configuration of the various
KDE mail applications. The aim is to share basic common
information between KDE email clients while each client will handle
its own advanced configuration.

Rik Hemsley has
implemented a system for giving user feedback while an
application is starting. This has been a weakness in KDE
1, where naive users tend to click “Netscape” indefinitely until
various windows and errors pop up all at once. Rik’s solution
fortunately does not involve turning the X pointer into an
hourglass, but rather takes the NeXT approach and indicates that an
app is launching in the taskbar.

Geert Jansen has
implemented and committed kdesu, a graphical
version of su that allows one to run a program under different user
privileges. Also included, of course, is a kcontrol module for
configuration. Stefan Westerfeld
announced MICOSec, a wrapper for MICO that implements the ORBit
authentication mechanism. Matt Koss
announced Motif DND, ready for integration. He is considering
submitting the patch for integration in Qt. Eric Bischoff announced the move
from LinuxDoc to DocBook for all KDE documentation.

As for Krash, the release dude (aka Waldo Bastian) has
announced that the KDE libraries are now in feature
freeze; kdebase and koffice will be feature frozen on the
15th. The plan is to release Krash quickly and unfreeze everything
so that developers can continue with the current furious pace of
development.

KDE Applications.The KDE Forum has a nice
feature article on Magellan
(screenshots),
touted as a powerful open source PIM rivalling Lotus Notes in
ambition. Edwin Glaser announced the DataWidget project, the
goal of which is to provide free data-aware widgets based on Qt
(see also KMySql). Jeff
Cody announced
kGrep, a GUI
utility for searching and displaying strings in text files
(shots).
Peter Putzer announced the latest version of KSysV, the SysV
Init Editor. Mirko Sucker
announced a new KDatePicker.
Markus Goetz is looking for assistance
with KWebSearch, a
frontend for Web search engines.

QCad is an open source 2D CAD
system based on Qt that might make a worthwhile port to KOffice. On
a related note, John Dean is seeking
volunteers to help port his 3D CAD system to KDE; a mailing list is
available.

However, the honour for best KDE application this month, goes to
Ky. All 567k of
it:

“Ky is a KDE version of the useful unix utility `yes’. I
find this comes in handy when I want to run `yes’, but I don’t want
to page through the output using something like `more’. Instead,
this gives me a nice GUI with a scrollbar. In addition, I can use
copy and paste to save the output if I want.”

As usual, if you are looking for packages of your favorite
applications, check out KLPP.
They even have the latest KDevelop and KDbg.

Other KDE Quickies. Cristian Tibirna has a slew
of slides available from his workshop
and talk
at Alternative:
Linux. Thomas Leitner
announced a port of KDE 1.1.2 to Digital/Tru64 Unix 4.0f. Need
free webhosting for a KDE project? Check out the new HOWTO.
Finally, drop by Microsoft’s site to see what they
think of KDE.

An archive for these reports is available. Une version
francaise pourrait eventuellement etre disponible ici.