BeOpen.com: BeOpen Interview with Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [KDE project co-manager]

“Matthias Kalle Dalheimer is a German software developer
whose professional life has revolved around machine user interface
technology. While his technical background makes it appear that
destiny hand-picked him to co-manage a project as broad and
ambitious as KDE — the first all-Open Source desktop for the Linux
operating system — Dalheimer assures us that was not the
case.”

“BeOpen: Now that the whole uproar surrounding
Qt prior to its becoming Open Source has passed, the KDE and Gnome
projects appear to be fairly similar in scope and objective. Has
your development team learned anything from the Gnome project that
you have applied in the upcoming release?

Dalheimer: There are a few things where we have
said, “Well, that’s something they have done nicely, let’s see if
we can produce something similar.” They have also copied many
things from us, but I cannot say that we have “learned” much from
them–in the sense of acquiring knowledge about new technologies.
If the Gnome project has taught us one thing, it is probably that
you should be very careful with releases and that releases should
be postponed if stability is insufficient.”

“BeOpen: Like Gnome, the KDE developers see the
future of their project involving some form of object request
broker middleware to handle distributed object coordination. And
like the Gnome developers, who have found limitations with the
CORBA standard, you have poured efforts into newer technologies
designed to be more responsive to the desktop realm. Unfortunately,
both projects seem to have taken a different tack — KDE with
KParts and DCOP, Gnome with ORBit. Is this something that could be
better tackled in tandem?

Dalheimer: Well, ORBit is a CORBA
implementation. Its authors claim that it is very lightweight, but
from what I have seen, this is mainly because it does not use or
does not implement all of CORBA. Once they use more of it, they
will probably run into the same problems. But the latency problem
that makes CORBA unsuitable for GUIs is not the only one we had,
even though the other ones were “softer”…”

Complete
Story